Knife Policy Reform: It’s on the table, and it matters more than you think.
The New York Times editorial board probably doesn’t strike you as a champion of Second Amendment rights. Sometimes, though, a law is so obviously ridiculous that surprising voices rise against it.
In 2016, the Times shed light on an archaic New York law that banned “gravity knives,” knives with an opening mechanism that functions with — you guessed it — the force of gravity. To be clear, there’s nothing particularly menacing about gravity knives, and banning them is stupid: The mechanism by which a knife opens is not a serious matter of public safety concern.
But the enforcement of the ban didn’t stop with gravity knives per se. New York police, when it suited them, were willing to regard any folding knife that could be flicked opened one-handed — and, with enough effort, that’s pretty much all pocket knives — as a gravity knife.
Of course, this created huge problems. Consider how many hundreds or thousands of times innocent people had experiences similar to this:
Eric Correa, a 34-year-old New York City parks department employee who was arrested on charges of possessing a knife last year, said he bought his at a uniform shop in Jamaica, Queens.
Mr. Correa said in an interview that he used it to clean his weed-whacker at work, as well as to open cans of paint. But when an officer noticed it clipped to his pants on the subway, Mr. Correa was arrested.
“It felt like maybe it was a quick collar,” said Mr. Correa, who is part Latino and part African-American. The charges against him were eventually dismissed in exchange for community service, but he lost time at work.
Regular people carry and use similar knives for legitimate, lawful activity every day, and, as the Times editorial board observed, “Most don’t know that simply possessing such a knife breaks the law.”
Fortunately, New York’s gravity knife ban was repealed in 2019. However, similar statutes remain on the books — including, unfortunately, some federal policies.
Federal statute defines “switchblade” as follows:
any knife having a blade which opens automatically —
(1) by hand pressure applied to a button or other device in the handle of the knife, or
(2) by operation of inertia, gravity, or both.
Federal law does not ban switchblades outright, but rather restricts their introduction into and movement in interstate commerce. However, the federal definition has provided an unfortunate, insidious basis for defining and banning “switchblades” via state and local laws.
Moreover, the federal switchblade definition is problematic in much the same way that New York’s operative “gravity knife” definition was. Virtually any folding knife can be opened “by operation of inertia,” and, sure enough, some authorities have tried to apply the statute in a manner that would apply to all such knives.
In 2009, U.S. Customs and Border Protection interpreted federal switchblade law “to include any one-hand opening knife. These knives represented, at the time, approximately 80% of the folding knives sold in the U.S. and also imported into the U.S.”
Fortunately, Congress did put a stop to that particular misinterpretation. However, the federal switchblade law remains intact and continues to pose problems.
More and more states are realizing that there’s no public safety value in trying to restrict pointy things and that enforcing such policies is costly in terms of both money and personal liberty. So states are ditching their switchblade bans in a bipartisan effort that reflects both the Second Amendment and criminal justice reform issues at stake. An important accompaniment to eliminating such state bans is statewide preemption of local bans — that is, state-level policies which prevent counties and municipalities from implementing their own prohibitions.
Statewide preemption prevents a situation in which a patchwork of local policies can turn you into a criminal by virtue of the fact that you drove a mile or walked across a street and crossed a county or municipal boundary in the process. (Do you even know exactly where all of these boundaries are — the boundaries of each city, town, township, county, etc. — within, say, an hour of your home? Probably not, because it usually doesn’t matter. And it shouldn’t.)
Statewide preemption is important and necessary, but it doesn’t do anything to address the fact that having “the wrong kind of pointy thing” in your pocket can still turn you into a criminal if you cross state lines. To address this problem, federal reform is needed.
H.R. 60, recently introduced by Representative Andy Biggs, aims “(t)o protect the right of law-abiding citizens to transport knives interstate, notwithstanding a patchwork of local and State prohibitions, and to repeal Federal provisions related to switchblade knives which burden citizens.” The full text of the bill is not available yet, but if it lives up to the stated intention, it is an excellent reform measure to consider.
If you have followed my other writing, you may have noticed a common theme: I am particularly offended by laws that can ensnare people who are likely to run afoul of them unwittingly or through no fault of their own, like what happened to Eric Correa.
And unless your state has state-level preemption of local knife policies, I am certain that you have no idea what rules you’ll be bound by within a one-hour radius of your own home. Most of the time, that doesn’t matter: you don’t know you’re breaking laws, but neither does anyone else.
Most of them time. But when it does matter, it can have life-changing consequences. Ask Mr. Correa. I’d tell you to ask Freddie Gray…if you could.
We should take every opportunity to remove these pointless legal stumbling blocks from the lives of our fellow Americans.
