This article appeared in Knife Magazine in June 2026
Know Your Knife Laws – Minnesota’s Last Gasp
By Anthony Sculimbrene, Attorney and Knife Expert
At the end of April 2026, we got a rare glimpse at a state trying desperately to hold on to its automatic knife ban. In Knife Rights v. Keith Ellison, the federal district court of Minnesota considered whether an auto knife ban survives Bruen, Canjura, et al. This is the first time since Canjura that we have had a real court fight on the issue. The matter was argued on April 24, 2026, and as of May 20, no issue has been ordered. Media coverage highlighted several salient points from the bench, which are a positive indication, but we won’t know who wins until the judge issues his order.
The arguments themselves, however, provide real insight into the state of knife law in the U. S. Knife Rights made arguments similar to those they have made elsewhere. As such, I am not going to repeat them as we have discussed them in dozens of articles in the past. This article focuses on the arguments made by the Attorney General, Keith Ellison. Before we get to the arguments, I want to clarify the history of the litigation. First, the Court is considering a motion for summary judgment. That is a motion, filed before trial but after discovery, which requests that the Court resolve certain factual and legal disputes. In essence, the parties are saying to the Court, “We don’t need a jury trial to determine the winner because we win on undisputed facts and the law that applies to those facts.” Here, both sides filed for Summary Judgment.
Interestingly, the Minnesota Attorney General did not make the same argument that was made in Hawaii and in Knife Rights v. Garland about procedural issues. In those cases, the government defended the auto ban by arguing that Knife Rights and the people it used as plaintiffs failed to meet procedural standards for bringing a case. As this argument was successful before, I cannot, for the life of me, think why the Minnesota AG wouldn’t make it here. But they didn’t. Instead, they made three arguments: 1) switchblades are dangerous and unusual weapons that are uncommon for self-defense; 2) a ban on them fits within historical legal traditions; and 3) autos are not commonly used for self-defense. Each of these arguments has been made before, specifically in Canjura, and each has been rejected before. Hopefully, that presages what will happen here.
Starting with Heller and going through Bruen, the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Minnesota AG argued, has recognized that certain weapons are so unusual and dangerous that they fall outside the ambit of the Second Amendment. The representative weapon for this category is the sawed-off shotgun. At least as early as U.S. v. Miller in 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that a sawed-off shotgun is so different and unlike other arms that it does not warrant Second Amendment protection. Autos, however, have never consistently been placed in the category. The Minnesota AG tries to cobble together case law from random jurisdictions to support this claim, but ultimately fails. Instead of finding a US Supreme Court case, the Minnesota AG conflates two things–suitability for self-defense and being dangerous and unusual. The reality is that many things that are poor in self-defense roles are obviously excluded from the dangerous and unusual category–bows, for example, are not great in self-defense but are clearly within the ambit of the Second Amendment. Without a U.S. Supreme Court case and by clearly conflating two unrelated issues, the Minnesota AG’s first argument is unpersuasive.
The second argument is stronger, but only in context (i.e., there is always a smartest Kardashian, even if she isn’t smart enough to pass the bar, with all the money in the world at her disposal). Here, they argue that analogical reasoning from historical bans to modern ones allows for a prohibition on autos. The problem here is that the Minnesota AG has stretched the Bruen model beyond the breaking point. The only “historical” laws they show that ban autos were from the 1950s, the same era in which Minnesota passed its ban. No court has found this was sufficiently old to use in the Bruen analysis. Instead of admitting this weakness, they argued that ANY knife ban or ban on concealed carry weapons is an historical analog for an auto ban. This, of course, is not true, nor has any court found it to be true. They even reference Canjura here and argue that it was wrongly decided. Unlike the Minnesota AG, the court in Canjura looked to pocketknife bans as historical antecedents and, upon finding none, struck down the auto ban in Massachusetts. The Minnesota AG is simply saying everyone else got it wrong, and we got it right. This seems suspect.
The final argument they make refocuses on the commonality test proposed by the 8th Circuit (which the U.S. Supreme Court did not adopt). Under this argument, how regularly an item is used in self-defense determines whether it is protected by the Second Amendment and not a dangerous or unusual weapon. Knife Rights proffered Michael Janich and Ernest Emerson, both unquestioned experts on knives and knife history. Minnesota used a traditional historian. In arguing the common use issue, they claimed that Janich’s opinions were unsupported by the facts. The problem, of course, is that there ARE no nationwide databases regarding knives used in self-defense. In fact, my experience in criminal cases tells me that the most often used knife in a self-defense scenario is a kitchen knife, as they are the most readily accessible and most widely owned. In the end, this argument fails because the Minnesota AG doesn’t make its own argument. Instead, they simply dispute the credentials of Knife Rights experts, a clear mistake given the standard for expert witnesses and the identities of Knife Rights experts.
Frankly, as a lawyer who has argued thousands of cases in court, the Minnesota AG’s arguments were almost frivolous. The Commonwealth in Canjura did a substantially better job. While crammed with citations, the logic of the AG’s position is flimsy to the point of embarrassment. The judge’s reactions, according to media accounts, support this reading. Specifically, Judge Schlitz took the AG to task on the merits of an auto as a mechanism of self-defense. He pointed out that even though an AK-47 is rarely used in self-defense, “being able to stick [one] out your kitchen window…[would] make it great for self-defense. ”Other comments from the bench indicate similar levels of skepticism.
In the end, I can’t even give a tip of the hat for a valiant but losing attempt here. The AG’s arguments come off as ill-formed, misleading (attacking Michael Janich and Ernest Emerson as not experts is nuts), and frankly, baseless. The AG should have made the standing argument, which I still think has real potency. Instead, they seem to have let politics, not the law, make their arguments for them. In this case, that is a bad strategy, and I hope they fail.
Minnesota Knife Law
Bruen Primer for Knife Owners
Canjura Redux
Knife Rights v Garland