California Switchblade Law

 Knife Rights v. Bonta (9th Cir. 2026). This being the 9th Circuit, they upheld California's ban on concealed carry of switchblade knives. I am disappointed that I was not asked to provide expert declarations or rebut the other side's expert declarations. I am not sure how much difference it would have made. At the core of this decision is the concept of how and why:

In assessing whether a law is "relevantly similar under the Second Amendment," courts are instructed to compare modern and historical regulations in terms of "how and why the regulations burden a law-abiding citizen's right to armed self-defense."...

Other states and territories continued to adopt concealed carry restrictions on Bowie knives and other dangerous knives and weapons during and after the Civil War. These states punished unlawful concealed carry with imprisonment, fines, or both.^[10] In addition, the record includes prohibitions on the concealed carry of knives from several cities in the post-Civil War period.^[11]

The record also includes evidence as to why jurisdictions prohibited the concealed carry of Bowie knives and other knives. One of California's experts, Dr. Robert Spitzer, explained that "Bowie knives were widely used in fights and duels," and were known to be "fighting knives" intended for "[interpersonal] combat." Another expert, Dr. Brennan Rivas, explained that "[a]s rates of violence rose during the nineteenth century, people were more likely to carry and use large knives; the increased presence of knives . . . had the regrettable consequence of exacerbating the problem." This problem was "especially notable in southern areas, where Bowie knives were quite common and known to be associated with needless bloodshed." 

The problem here is why those laws were adopted. The decision acknowledges that these laws adopted in the 1950s because of criminal use.(Perhaps largely in West Side Story.) The why for the antebellum period was not members of the criminal class but the people who would become legislators, judges, and militia officers. My book Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic examines this odd situation in more detail.