This article appeared in Knife Magazine in February 2026
Know Your Knife Laws – Using History to Make Laws
By Anthony Sculimbrene, Attorney and Knife Expert
In Bruen, the U.S. Supreme Court announced a new standard for the Second Amendment and for constitutional rights as a whole. An individual has a right to bear arms, and laws infringing on that right are unconstitutional UNLESS they are “consistent with the nation’s historical traditions.” The modern and historical laws do not need to be identical, but simply similar. As a result of this test, history becomes incredibly important. So I want to look at two things–both the history of the automatic knife and the history of laws banning such tools. Hopefully, this will make Bruen arguments easier to make.
The oldest folding knife is generally considered to be the Hallstatt folder, from roughly 2600 years ago. There are nearly as ancient extant folders from the Roman Empire. But automatic knives are a relatively recent invention. The key innovation that makes automatic knives possible is the invention of the small tempered steel spring. Invented in 1742 by Benjamin Huntsman, a horologist and Quaker from Epworth, Lincolnshire, in England, the small tempered steel spring went on to revolutionize the manufacture of all sorts of items.
The small tempered steel spring was first combined with an edged tool in the late 1700s by Italian makers. This gave birth to the first automatic knife ban in 1816, when legal reforms swept through Italy as part of their integration into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It would be almost a century before Italian switchblades resumed manufacture in 1900. These spring-activated knives also presaged spring-activated bayonets. By the 1840s, at least half a dozen cutlers in England were making automatic knives. These efforts mainly were small batches of knives. In 1892, small-scale production went big, as George Schrade pioneered ways to mass-produce automatic knives. He did so through a production facility in New York City.
Ironically, New York was also the first state to ban automatic knives, doing so in 1954. Massachusetts soon followed, passing a similar bill in 1957. Other states followed. The Federal Switchblade Act was passed in 1958. Often, people think that this moral panic was caused by the debut of West Side Story, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet where two rival street gangs fight each other, and one such battle involves the use of automatic knives. But that is revisionist history, as West Side Story didn’t debut until 1957, three years AFTER the New York law took effect and a few weeks after the Massachusetts law was passed. Perhaps 50s Congressmen were Rita Moreno fans, but it is clear New York’s law wasn’t motivated by West Side Story.
The question becomes whether or not that record counts as sufficiently old for the test set forth in Bruen. In reviewing cases, my opinion is that it doesn’t. If 1958 counts as a time period consistent with our nation’s historical traditions, everything does, and, in that case, the Bruen test becomes meaningless. Here is a rundown of cases where the courts have found laws that were old enough to count as being part of “our nation’s historical traditions.” In US v. Rahimi, the Supreme Court found that modern laws banning perpetrators of domestic violence were similar to laws from the late 1700s and early 1800s involving people deemed “dangerous.” In Bruen itself, they found that surety laws that required people to post a bond to carry a firearm were part of our “nation’s historical traditions.” These laws, like those for dangerous people, were enacted from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. Heller, Bruen’s seed case, noted that bans on unusually dangerous firearms were fine, again relying on the late 1700s and early 1800s laws. In US v. Allam, the 5th Circuit found that late 1800s laws banning guns in sensitive areas were sufficiently analogous to modern gun-free school zone laws to pass the Bruen test. These are, so far as I can find, the “youngest” laws to count. No law limiting Second Amendment rights has been upheld when the “historical antecedent” was as new as 1958.
Bruen’s holding has posed challenges for lower courts in ways that other cases have not. Among those challenges is this historical traditions test. In the strictest sense, every moment before this one is historical, but that doesn’t seem to be what Thomas meant. Still, the age difference between the laws in Rahimi and those in Allam exceeds 100 years. Could 67 years be old enough to count as a historical tradition? I hope not, but the answer is not clear from case law.
Learn more about the Federal Switchblade Act, state laws regarding automatic knives, and the referenced court cases at www.AKTI.org, your reliable source and advocate for the knife community.