WHILE THE MASSACHUSETTS Legislature weighs 56 bills related to firearm regulation, the state’s highest court is preparing to consider whether an absolute ban on carrying switchblade knives violates the Second Amendment.
Seven years after the US Supreme Court suggested that a similar ban on carrying stun guns in the Commonwealth was unconstitutional – overturning the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s conclusion that such a ban was permissible – these spring-activated knives are next in the firing line.
“Just as the Constitution protects the possession of stun guns, it strains credulity to suppose that individuals have a fundamental constitutional right to carry a handgun outside their homes but not a vastly less lethal item such as a knife,” knife rights groups wrote in a brief submitted to the SJC.
The case – scheduled for oral argument on Monday – stems from a July 2020 incident in which police responding to reports of a fight between a couple at Temple Place in Boston found David Canjura apparently preventing his girlfriend Maria Torres from walking away. Canjura told police he had not seen or heard from Torres all day and had just found her walking into a bar with another man, according to court filings citing the police report.
Canjura reportedly pushed Torres against a wall and took her phone. After police retrieved the phone and placed Canjura under arrest for assault and battery, a search revealed a switchblade at his waist.
There was no allegation that the knife was ever drawn, brandished, or used during the incident. But holding it was enough to violate G.L.c. 269, §10(b), the state ban on carrying switchblade knives.
While the Canjura case was being considered, the US Supreme Court handed down New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which invalidated certain New York firearm licensing regulations before a handgun could be purchased and requires judges to consider whether modern-day regulations mirror what was in place around the time of the country’s founding.
Bruen was yet another expansion of the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment interpretation, which for the past 15 years has led to overturned state laws around the country that sought to regulate deadly weapons.
“This case represents this Court’s first opportunity to construe the contours of the standard outlined in Bruen, a decision that directly affects not only Mr. Canjura’s constitutional rights, but the rights of many other similarly situated defendants,” attorney Kaitlyn Gerber of the Committee for Public Counsel Services wrote in March, requesting that the SJC consider the case.
Massachusetts officials argue that state and Supreme Court rulings on firearms do not apply to knives.
“The defendant cannot point to any Massachusetts decision supporting the proposition that knives do constitute arms under the Second Amendment because there does not appear to be any that supports it,” Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden and assistant attorney general David McGowan wrote in the state’s brief. Furthermore, federal rulings considered “regulations on firearms, and specifically regulations on handguns, not regulations on the carrying of knives, and it is a bridge too far to read ‘knife’ for ‘firearm’ in those decisions.”
Even if the Second Amendment does consider knives, the attorney general’s office asserts that switchblades are not the typical kind of weapons used for self-defense. Plus, the state has a history of regulating their usage, banning them from being carried in public in 1957, which puts Massachusetts in the company of many states that set similar bans in the 1950s and 1960s.
The SJC was sympathetic to similar arguments in 2015 when it came to a ban on stun guns, but the federal landscape has shifted since then – a more conservative federal bench consistently chafing against strict restrictions on a class of deadly weaponry.
The Second Amendment “is neither a regulatory straightjacket nor a regulatory blank check,” the US Supreme Court wrote in Bruen. Massachusetts’ high court will consider next week whether the state’s long-standing ban on switchblades constitutionally overstepped.