Massachusetts Supreme Court: Switchblade Carry Ban Violates Second Amendment

The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled Tuesday the state’s ban on carrying switchblade knives violates the Second Amendment.

The case is Commonwealth v. David E. Canjura.

Canjura was arrested on July 3, 2020, and a search of his person uncovered a knife “with a spring-assisted blade.” He was charged with “carrying a dangerous weapon,” among other charges, but challenged the constitutionality of the switchblade carry ban “in a pretrial motion to dismiss.”

He “argued that because a switchblade is an ‘arm,’ [the] prohibition on carrying a switchblade violated his Second Amendment right to bear arms for self-defense.”

The Massachusetts Supreme Court weighed Canjura’s motion via the U.S. Supreme Court’s Heller (2008) and Bruen (2022) decisions, noting, “The central component’ of the Second Amendment is the ‘inherent right of self-defense,’ which “guarantee[s] to ‘all Americans’ the right to bear commonly used arms in public subject to certain reasonable, well-defined restrictions.”

They observed, “While both Heller and Bruen involved handguns, Second Amendment protections subsume more than just firearms.”

The Massachusetts Supreme Court then focused specifically on Bruen’s “two part test” and found “the Commonwealth does not identify any laws regulating bladed weapons akin to folding pocketknives generally, or switchblades particularly, in place at the time of the founding or ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

They subsequently observed that the Commonwealth “has not met its burden of demonstrating a historical tradition justifying the regulation of switchblade knives…”

The Massachusetts Supreme Court wrote: “In this case, we are asked to decide whether…[the] prohibition against carrying a switchblade knife violates the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, considering…Bruen. We conclude it does.”