Fifth Circuit Strikes Down the 1958 Federal Switchblade Act’s Interstate Ban, Holding Switchblades Are Protected Arms and the Right to Keep Them Includes the Right to Make, Ship, and Sell Them

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NEW ORLEANS, LA — The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down the core of the Federal Switchblade Act, holding that switchblade knives are “Arms” protected by the Second Amendment and that the 1958 law’s ban on introducing, manufacturing, transporting, or distributing them in interstate commerce violates the Constitution. The opinion in Knife Rights, Inc. v. Blanche, No. 25-10754, filed October 21, 2026, was written by Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod and joined by Judges Willett and Wilson.

The court reversed the district court’s dismissal of the challenge to 15 U.S.C. § 1242, affirmed the dismissal of a separate facial challenge to § 1243, and remanded the case, meaning it goes back to the Northern District of Texas for further proceedings. The plaintiffs are Knife Rights, Inc.; two Texas federally licensed firearms dealers, RGA Auction Solution, doing business as Firearm Solutions, and MOD Specialties; their owners, Russell Arnold and Jeffrey Folloder; and three Knife Rights members, Evan Kaufmann, Adam Warden, and Rodney Shedd. The defendants are Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Wallace Blanche and the Department of Justice.

The opinion opens with Rebel Without a Cause. Chief Judge Elrod traces the Federal Switchblade Act to the 1950s panic over juvenile delinquency, when a Senate subcommittee estimated that 1,200,000 switchblades entered the market each year and found that many crossed state lines around more than twenty states’ bans on automatic-opening knives. Congress lacked a general police power, so it reached for the Commerce Clause and went after the supply chain. Section 1242 made it a federal crime, punishable by up to $2,000 or five years in prison or both, to knowingly introduce, manufacture for introduction, transport, or distribute a switchblade in interstate commerce. Section 1243 separately barred manufacture, sale, or possession in U.S. territories, Indian country, and the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

The first question under Bruen, the 2022 Supreme Court decision that governs Second Amendment cases, is whether the amendment’s plain text covers the conduct at issue. The court held that it does. Citing Heller’s founding-era definition of arms as “any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another,” the panel walked through the history: spring-blade knives built into flintlock pistols in the 1700s, large-scale American switchblade production beginning in the 1880s, and roughly twenty domestic manufacturers between the mid-1890s and the mid-1940s. The government argued switchblades are not in common use. The court rejected that outright, pointing to a record showing “millions” of automatic knives in the United States and lawful use for everyday utility, hunting, fishing, recreation, and camping.

The part I find most significant reaches well past knives. The panel asked whether the right to “keep and bear” arms extends to acquiring them, and answered yes, relying on its own decision in Reese v. ATF, which held that “the right to ‘keep and bear arms’ surely implies the right to purchase them.” From there the court took the next logical step: the right to purchase arms implies the right to manufacture, transport, and distribute them. A supply-chain regulation is still an arms regulation, and the government has to justify it like any other. Every firearm in every safe in this country was made, shipped, and sold by somebody.

At step two, the burden shifts to the government to show the law fits the nation’s historical tradition of arms regulation, looking at both why a law regulates and how it does so. The government leaned on nineteenth-century cases upholding bans on concealed carry of dirks, daggers, and pistols. The court said those laws address the “why,” a tradition of regulating concealable weapons, but every one of them regulates the manner of carrying, not manufacture or distribution. The government’s best evidence was a law review survey cataloging nearly two hundred pre-1900 statutes on daggers, dirks, and sword canes. Of those, exactly two, an 1881 Arkansas law and an 1837 Georgia law, restricted sale or transfer the way § 1242 does. “Two laws out of nearly two hundred bring us into outlier territory,” the court wrote, and Bruen bars courts from propping up modern laws on historical outliers.

Before reaching any of that, the court had to confirm the plaintiffs had standing, meaning a real, concrete stake that lets them sue before anyone is prosecuted. The government made that easy. At oral argument, its lawyer told the panel: “we are not in a position to disavow enforcement. I’m, like, affirmatively telling you we will not, have not, are not disavowing enforcement.” The government has brought prosecutions under § 1242, and it confirmed it could charge someone under § 1243 even though the Department of Justice has no record of doing so in records dating back to 2004. That was enough.

The plaintiffs did not win everything. Their challenge to § 1243 was a facial challenge, which argues a law is unconstitutional in every possible application rather than just as applied to the people suing. Outside the First Amendment, that means proving no set of circumstances exists in which the law would be valid. The government listed aircraft, courthouses, federal prisons, embassies, and military bases as places where restricting switchblades plainly passes muster, and the plaintiffs never addressed the standard in their opening brief. The court affirmed the dismissal of that claim without deciding whether § 1243 itself violates the Second Amendment. That leaves Rodney Shedd, who lives on Muscogee Nation land in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had to abandon his switchblade before moving there, without relief for now.

More from USA Carry:

• Fifth Circuit Strikes Down Federal Handgun Sales Ban for 18-to-20-Year-Olds
• Federal Judge Strikes Down New York’s First-of-Its-Kind Body Armor Ban, Rules Body Armor Is an ‘Arm’ Protected by the Second Amendment
• Texas Admitted These Gun Bans Are Unconstitutional. Now FPC Is Asking a Federal Court to Kill Them.
• Third Circuit Strikes Down New Jersey’s Semiautomatic Rifle and 10-Round Magazine Bans as Unconstitutional
• Justice Thomas Asked Courts to Reexamine Federal Gun Bans. The Fifth Circuit Just Answered

Nothing in this ruling touches state knife law. The opinion itself notes that more than twenty states already banned the sale of automatic knives when Congress acted in 1958, and that states regulate blades under police powers the federal government does not have. Part of a serious carry mindset is knowing the law where you stand, and that goes for the knife in your pocket as much as the pistol on your hip. My concealed carry permit information by state pages cover firearms; knife law is a separate map, and a federal ruling on interstate commerce does not redraw it.

The court closed by noting that Heller and Bruen also involved laws aimed at perceived societal problems, and the Supreme Court struck those down anyway. The Federal Switchblade Act was Congress’s answer to James Dean. Sixty-eight years later, three judges in the Fifth Circuit held that the answer never fit the Second Amendment. I will continue tracking Knife Rights, Inc. v. Blanche as it returns to the Northern District of Texas.

Read the original story: Fifth Circuit Strikes Down the 1958 Federal Switchblade Act’s Interstate Ban, Holding Switchblades Are Protected Arms and the Right to Keep Them Includes the Right to Make, Ship, and Sell Them