Fifth Circuit Rules Federal Switchblade Ban Unconstitutional

Last updated October 2026 · By Nick Hall, read the full Fifth Circuit opinion in Knife Rights v. Blanche and the 1958 statute behind it

Quick take: The Fifth Circuit ruled on October 21 that switchblades are Second Amendment “Arms” and that the Federal Switchblade Act’s ban on moving them through interstate commerce is unconstitutional. The ruling binds federal courts in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and it isn’t the last word yet.

• Ruling: The panel held that 15 U.S.C. 1242, which bans introducing, manufacturing for introduction, transporting or distributing switchblades in interstate commerce, fails the Bruen test.
• Court: Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote for a Fifth Circuit panel with Judges Willett and Wilson in Knife Rights, Inc. v. Blanche, No. 25-10754.
• Why it matters: It’s a federal appeals court deciding outright that a non-firearm weapon is a Second Amendment arm, and then striking a federal supply-chain ban on it.
• What’s next: The case goes back to the Northern District of Texas, and the government has 45 days to seek rehearing before the mandate can issue.

Most Bruen-era rulings are about rifles, magazines or who gets to carry. This one is about a knife Congress went after in 1958, at the height of a panic over juvenile delinquency, and the opinion literally opens with James Dean. We pulled the 27-page opinion so you don’t have to, and the part gun owners should care about is how the court got there.

Table of Contents

What the Fifth Circuit Struck in Knife Rights v. Blanche

The Federal Switchblade Act dates to 1958. Its core is 15 U.S.C. 1242, which says anyone who “knowingly introduces, or manufactures for introduction, into interstate commerce, or transports or distributes in interstate commerce, any switchblade knife” faces up to five years in prison and a $2,000 fine. The statute defines a switchblade as a knife whose blade opens automatically by a button or other device in the handle, or by inertia, gravity, or both.

Knife Rights, Inc. sued in the Northern District of Texas in September 2024, joined by two Texas retailers and five individuals. Both retailers are federally licensed firearms dealers who sell knives but say they don’t market automatic knives because of the Act. The named defendants are Todd Wallace Blanche, as Acting U.S. Attorney General, and the Department of Justice.

The district court assumed switchblades were arms and dismissed the case anyway, reasoning that Section 1242 wasn’t “a de facto prohibition on possession” since switchblades are still sold within states. The Fifth Circuit said that approach “led the district court’s analysis astray” and ran the full Bruen analysis itself.

The opinion, filed October 21, 2026, comes from Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, with Judges Willett and Wilson on the panel. The bottom line, in the court’s words: “We REVERSE the district court’s grant of the government’s motion to dismiss as to the § 1242 claim.”

Why Switchblades Count as Arms

Step one of Bruen asks whether the Second Amendment’s text covers the conduct. The panel went straight to the founding-era dictionary definition Heller relied on, which covers anything a man “takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another.” Switchblades, the court said, “have surely been used” that way.

Then came the history. The opinion traces spring-opening blades back to 1700s flintlock pistols that carried a knife for when the gun misfired, notes that large-scale US switchblade production began in the 1880s, and counts about 20 American companies making them between the mid 1890s and the mid 1940s. The record also shows “millions” of automatic knives in the country today, used for everyday utility, hunting, fishing and camping.

So the government’s argument that switchblades aren’t in common use went nowhere. The panel noted the circuits disagree on whether common use belongs at step one or step two, and said the government “loses regardless.”

The last piece was whether a ban on making and shipping knives touches the right to keep and bear them at all. Here the court relied on its own 2025 Reese decision, the case that held the federal ban on dealer handgun sales to 18 to 20 year olds unconstitutional: the right to own arms implies the right to buy them, and the right to buy implies someone may make, move and sell them. That’s why a supply-chain law gets full Bruen scrutiny instead of a pass.

The Whole Ballgame Was the How

At step two the government has to show the law fits the nation’s historical tradition. DOJ built its case on 19th-century laws against carrying concealed weapons, arguing switchblades are inherently concealable and dangerous. The panel said that only answers the “why.” It never answers the “how.”

The old laws DOJ cited regulated how people carried weapons. None of them, the court found, regulated manufacture, transport or distribution. The government’s best source was a single law review article cataloging nearly two hundred pre-1900 statutes on daggers, dirks and sword canes, and only two of them, an 1881 Arkansas law and an 1837 Georgia law, banned sales the way Section 1242 does.

“Two laws out of nearly two hundred bring us into outlier territory,” Elrod wrote. Bruen says outliers don’t save a modern law, so Section 1242 fell.

But notice what the Fifth Circuit did not touch. In a separate Knife Rights case, the Ninth Circuit upheld California’s ban on concealed carry of switchblades in public in January 2026, assuming without deciding that the plain text applied and finding concealed-carry bans fit the Bowie knife laws of the 1800s. Carry rules and supply-chain bans are different animals, and both courts treated them that way.

Why Section 1243 Survived

Section 1243 makes it a crime to make, sell or possess a switchblade in the territories, in Indian country, or within federal maritime and territorial jurisdiction. The challenge here was facial only, so the plaintiffs had to show the law has no valid application at all.

They didn’t come close. The government pointed to aircraft, courthouses, federal prisons, embassies and military bases, and the Supreme Court has already treated restrictions in government buildings as settled. The panel affirmed the dismissal of the Section 1243 claim, and the challengers, it said, “have no good response.”

One wrinkle: the court actually reversed the district court on standing for Section 1243, finding that plaintiff Rodney Shedd, who lives on Muscogee Nation land in Oklahoma, faces a credible threat of prosecution. Standing got him in the door. The facial theory sent him back out.

Why a Knife Case Matters to Gun Owners

The line in this opinion that will travel is a short one. “Arms,” the court wrote, “was never understood to merely apply to firearms.” Plenty of courts sidestep that question. In December 2025 the same chief judge wrote the Fifth Circuit’s Peterson suppressor opinion, which rejected a challenge to the NFA’s suppressor registration rule after assuming without deciding that “the Second Amendment protects suppressors.”

Here the panel didn’t assume anything. It decided the arms question on the history, and the definition it used opens with “any thing that a man wears” for protection. Anyone watching the fights over body armor and suppressors will notice that word. To be clear, this ruling decides switchblades and nothing else.

It also lands about five weeks after the Fifth Circuit’s ruling against the federal interstate handgun sales ban, and the logic rhymes. Both cases go after federal limits on moving arms across state lines, and both build on Reese’s point that the right to keep arms includes the right to acquire them.

What the Ruling Does Not Do Yet

It doesn’t open up interstate switchblade sales today. The panel reversed a dismissal and remanded “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” so the declaration and injunction the plaintiffs asked for still have to come from the district court. Unlike the handgun case, the panel did not render judgment itself.

The calendar matters too. Because the United States is a party, the appellate rules give the government 45 days after judgment to petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc, and the mandate issues 7 days after that window closes, or after any timely petition is denied, unless the court changes the timing. The government can also ask the Supreme Court to take the case. At oral argument the government’s lawyer said the government was “affirmatively telling you we will not, have not, are not disavowing enforcement.”

Geography limits it as well. A Fifth Circuit precedent binds federal courts in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi only, and the Act stays fully on the books everywhere else. State and local knife laws are a separate question this case does not touch, so check your own state before you order one. The exceptions in Section 1244, including the 2009 carve-out for assisted-opening knives, are unchanged, and the separate federal ban on ballistic knives in Section 1245 wasn’t part of the case.

A knife case. Decided on the same history test that will decide your next gun case.

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• Fifth Circuit Strikes Federal Interstate Handgun Sales Ban
• Bruen Decision Explained: The History-and-Tradition Test
• Texas Gun Laws: Constitutional Carry, LTC and Castle Doctrine
• Louisiana Gun Laws: Constitutional Carry at 18 and Stand Your Ground
• Mississippi Gun Laws: Constitutional Carry and the Enhanced Permit
• Best Pocket Knives for Everyday Carry