This article appeared in Knife Magazine May 2025.
Know Your Knife Laws – Teter II
By Anthony Sculimbrene, Attorney and Knife Expert
The Teter case has been winding its way through the courts for years, and the contours of that case presage where things are headed with knife laws. I have written about it in this column before. This most recent opinion is not good for knife owners. But before we get to the recent development, let’s recap. Teter was brought by a group of knife enthusiasts claiming that Hawaii’s law banning balisong or butterfly knives violated their Second Amendment rights. The federal district court in Hawaii heard the case, and Teter lost. The case was then appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where a three-person panel reversed and Teter won. The 9th Circuit then scheduled a hearing in front of the full court (“en banc”). While the case was pending, two things happened: Bruen and Hawaii changed the law on Balisongs, removing the prohibition on ownership and instead enacting a prohibition on concealed carry.
The full court issued its ruling, and the results are, again, as with Knife Rights v. Garland, bad for knife owners. Like Knife Rights v. Garland, the 9th Circuit held that it did not have jurisdiction over the case and, therefore, remanded it to the lower court without reaching the substantive legal issue. The procedural hurdle in Garland was standing. Here is something called mootness. Either way, it is clear that courts are interpreting Bruen and challenges to knife laws very differently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
How the issue in Teter became moot is key to seeing where courts are going with knife laws post-Bruen. When Teter challenged the Hawaii law, it banned the ownership of butterfly knives. When the Court heard the case, the law changed, and now it merely banned the concealed carry of butterfly knives. The 9th Circuit claimed that this change was important enough to impact the case. That is, if the legal ban was no longer in effect, there was no use in ruling on whether such a ban was constitutional or not. The issue was no longer a real dispute, or, as the law calls it, the issue was moot. Teter tried mightily to save the case, claiming that the prohibition on concealed carry was, in essence, the same thing as a ban and that the law was changed by ill motive. The Court did not accept either argument and, again, delayed clarifying a knife law by rejecting a case without reaching the legal dispute.
One case makes this a fluke; two make it a trend. Even in places like Texas, where Garland was litigated, federal courts do not want to take up this issue, especially in a civil case where the stakes and standards are different. In large part, this is because this is a fight they can avoid. As the court noted in Garland, there are so few federal prosecutions under the Federal Switchblade Act that the knife community’s desire for clarity lacks the sufficient impact to warrant federal judicial attention. Attacking a law as unconstitutional is a huge burden to overcome. In a criminal case where the court is balancing a law against the freedom of a human being, they care a bit (though, frankly, not much, given how rare it is to get a case dismissed in criminal court on these grounds). In a civil case where it is a bunch of knife collectors asking for permission to buy yet another knife, the federal courts, like the spouses of knife knuts everywhere, don’t seem to care at all. If this kind of litigation is going to make a difference, it needs to be done in a criminal case. In addition to the stakes being higher, in a criminal case, the burden rests with the state, ultimately, and so they are the party forced to “carry the water,” the exact opposite of what happens in these civil cases.
The second issue this opinion portends is how anti-knife advocates will regulate knives in a post-Bruen world. I have written about this before, but the next frontier in knife rights is defining concealed carry. If this opinion stands, it will serve as a roadmap for anti-knife, anti-2A advocates–if you can’t ban the thing, ban carrying that thing in a convenient manner. This is much like what happened to the criminal law after the 1958 case of Robinson v. California. In that case, the US Supreme Court said that you could not ban drug use because drug use was the symptom of a status–being a drug addict. After that opinion, state legislatures around the country banned the possession of drugs, not their use. Teter is so dangerous because it tacitly blessed the change in Hawaii’s statute by rejecting Teter’s argument that his issue was not moot because the carry ban was functionally identical to the possession ban.
This issue doesn’t necessarily need a court decision to resolve the problem. If there was a standard definition of concealed carry, either in the statute itself or in the common law, we could have a ban that doesn’t really impact lawful knife owners. As I wrote before, there were two common definitions of concealed carry: having something on your person that is hard to see or having something on your person that indicates the carrier was trying to hide the item. Under the second definition, carrying a knife with a factory-installed clip is not trying to hide it but carrying it as it was designed to be carried (note that Teter tried to make an argument about clip carry, but it was rejected as there was no record in the district court about this issue).
Teter is bad, and knife advocates need to be ready for the next round of fights.
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