Plaintiffs in our lawsuit challenging California’s ban on switchblade (automatic) knives with a blade 2-inches and greater on Second Amendment grounds have filed their Opening Brief on appeal with the infamously anti-2A United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

As we saw recently in Teter, the Hawaii Butterfly Knife case, that doesn’t necessarily mean we get a final victory in the Ninth Circuit, no matter that we should, but it is the next step in the long road to fixing a problem that has no easy legislative solution. Second Amendment cases are generally marathons, not sprints. The Federal District Court’s ludicrous opinion, which has added new language and conditions to the plain text of Second Amendment, sets us up for a strong appeal.

Click to read our Opening Brief.

The Appeal Brief makes the point that the court, as happened in our case, cannot simply engraft additional language, in this case a requirement that the “arms” must be “commonly used for self defense,” onto the Second Amendment, nor to the Supreme Courts’ decisions, in order to avoid a favorable ruling for 2A plaintiffs. This is not the standard set forth in Heller, and affirmed in Bruen and Rahimi. They don’t get to make stuff up.

As Judge Benitez noted in a prior Federal 2A case in California, “…it would only be an argument if the Second Amendment said, ‘the right of the people to keep and bear only those Arms that are commonly used for self-defense, shall not be infringed.’ Of course, that is not the case. Use is not required for Second Amendment protection.”

The court also made the mistake of finding that automatically opening knives were somehow both “dangerous and unusual” weapons. The Court made this finding, even though all the experts in the case, including the State’s experts, said that automatically opening knives are just a variation of a common folding pocket knife. The Court also ignored the fact that the State never provided any evidence of any kind showing that a “switchblade” is any more dangerous than any other knife. However, the benefit of this is that all evidence favors the Plaintiffs on appeal.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Knife Rights Unconstitutional Switchblade Bans Chronicles.

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Knife Rights is America’s grassroots knife owners’ organization; leading the fight to Rewrite Knife Law in America™ and forging a Sharper Future for all Americans™. Knife Rights efforts have resulted in 50 bills enacted repealing knife bans in 31 states and over 200 cities and towns since 2010.