When most people think of the Second Amendment, they think about the right to keep and bear firearms.
And depending on where you are on gun rights, you might think that the whole discussion is whether someone can legally have a tank or an F-15 in their driveway or if they are limited to only owning a musket.
Of course, you’d be wrong if you think it’s limited to muskets, and not just because rapid fire guns were available, even if not common, at the time of the writing of the Constitution.
The other reason that you’d be wrong is because the right to keep and bear arms is about the right to keep and bear weapons, not just guns. That should have been obvious just by the term, but if it wasn’t, a federal court just cleared up that question. Nate Raymond writes,
A US law that bans the manufacturing of switchblades ​for sale or distribution across state lines violates the right to keep and bear ‌arms under the US Constitution’s Second Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled.
The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in a ruling, opens new tab late on Wednesday said a landmark 2022 US Supreme Court decision requiring modern gun restrictions to be consistent with ​the nation’s history and tradition of arms regulation also applied to bladed weapons covered by ​the Federal Switchblade Act.
For anyone that thinks that the court may have been wrong with this ruling, maybe they should consider the court’s reasoning in this ruling.
The reasoning is simple and straightforward: Knives have been used for self-defense for millennia, including in the early days of the United States. Therefore, switchblades, being a type of knife, are also protected by the Second Amendment.
So, the answer to the question is, no, the Second Amendment is not only about firearms. It includes switchblades, too, at the very least.
