This article appeared in Knife Magazine in July 2026
Know Your Knife Laws – Standing in Nebraska
By Anthony Sculimbrene, Attorney and Knife Expert
In 2024, Knife Rights and a group of knife owners filed suit in federal court in the Northern District of Texas, hoping the Court would strike down the Federal Switchblade Act after the US Supreme Court issued its opinion in Bruen. It was a straightforward application of law in a court very likely to be friendly to pro-2A litigants. They lost. In 2025, the Nebraska Supreme Court considered a simple challenge to state law. The law changed to allow Nebraskans to carry firearms and knives in a whole host of places. Omaha and Lincoln, as municipalities in Nebraska, acknowledged the binding state law but found small workarounds that seemed obviously contrary to it. The Nebraska Firearms Owners Association brought suit and, like Knife Rights, lost.
How can these groups that are clearly making logical, straightforward arguments keep losing? Why do Second Amendment advocacy groups keep getting thrown out of court? Both brought great arguments, but, unfortunately, neither got a chance to make them in earnest. Why? The issue is simple–neither group had standing. Standing is a fancy legal word for “stakes,” as in “Do you have a stake in this matter?” If you don’t have a stake in a matter, then you can’t get into court. And in both Knife Rights v. Garland and NFOA v. Lincoln, the advocacy groups didn’t have stakes in the matter.
That seems counterintuitive. How could two 2A advocacy organizations NOT have stakes in laws involving the exercise of Second Amendment rights? The answer is more complex, but it is important to understand if groups want to topple the FSA in court. Courts in the US are one branch of a three-part governmental structure. We all remember this from civics class (oh, remember civics class?)–there is the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The judicial branch is the only branch that deals with problems retrospectively–that is, people have a problem, they go to court, and the court sorts it out. Courts don’t see issues on the horizon and then create a solution; they repair things after they break. Additionally, while courts often deal with hot-button issues, they only do so when there is a legal angle to the problem. They don’t, for example, decide if trickle-down economics is good for the country (it is not, but that is beside the point). Instead, they decide if a law passed with the belief that trickle-down economics is bad for the country is legal. They also won’t take a case until the issue has come to a head. If a law is passed but is not set to take effect for years, they may not look at the case. All three of these concepts–standing, political questions, and ripeness–are part of a concept called justiciability. This is, again, a fancy legal word for something being capable of being judged. If a case is not justiciable, a court, with its very limited resources, won’t hear it.
This part is incredibly important–virtually every court system in the US is critically overwhelmed. If every case filed had to be fully litigated and resolved via trial, the entire country would come grinding to a halt. In the state where I practice, New Hampshire, there are probably 30,000-40,000 cases brought each year statewide. There are only 2,080 work hours in a year, and even if we had 40 judges and each case took only two or three hours, we would rapidly run out of judges’ time. Instead, courts have mechanisms to manage their docket. Two big ones streamline the process significantly: plea bargains and motions to dismiss/summary judgment. In criminal cases, which make up roughly 90% of cases, plea bargains resolve them before trial in the vast majority of cases. In civil cases, like the ones pro-2A groups bring, motions to dismiss and motions for summary judgment take cases off the trial docket. And justiciability issues are one of the primary grounds to dismiss a case.
What’s the solution to this justiciability crisis in pro-2A litigation? The answer is very, very simple – find people with standing. Now, in NFOA v. Lincoln, the court found that the advocacy group lacked standing, but the individuals who were part of the plaintiff’s side did not. They remanded the case to the district court just for the actual people. But it was a close call. An easier approach would be for pro-2A groups to team with people who already have standing, such as defendants in criminal cases. The most successful post-Bruen challenge to a weapons law was in Commonwealth v. Canjura. The Court thoroughly and convincingly repudiated the entire knife ban law. The holding in this case made automatic knives legal in Massachusetts, a state that would NEVER reach that conclusion via the legislative process. And that case was a criminal case. A similar thing happened in Caetano v. Commonwealth at the U.S. Supreme Court. Again, the court struck down a weapons law in a criminal case on constitutional grounds. The advantage of litigating these issues in criminal cases is that defendants in these cases ALWAYS have standing. These laws are contraband laws, that is, they criminalize mere possession of a thing, and so the prosecutors must prove, as an element of the offense, that the defendant possessed the weapon. This, in turn, ALWAYS equals a justiciable issue (standing, a non-political question, and an issue ripe for judicial consideration). In short, defendants in criminal cases always have a right to challenge the contraband law that impacts our Second Amendment rights.
Civil suits like the ones advocacy groups are bringing are going to face a harder road than criminal cases. In addition to dodging the justiciability problems, challenging weapons bans in criminal cases is strategically wiser for other reasons. First, the burden of proof in a criminal case is also drawn against the contraband law. Second, the significance of incarceration has increased due process. I understand the politics don’t always line up, but this issue is bigger than politics. It is about our individual rights as people in the US. Finding common cause between pro-2A groups and defendants in criminal cases has proven to be the more successful way to break down barriers to constitutional carry.
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More information about the court cases mentioned above can be found by searching the Know Your Knife Laws section of our website.