A nearly 70-year-old ban on carrying switchblades in Massachusetts was reversed by the state’s highest court on Tuesday after they determined that the knives are considered “arms” and therefore protected under the Second Amendment .
“Folding pocketknives not only fit within contemporaneous dictionary definitions of arms — which would encompass a broader category of knives that today includes switchblades — but they also were commonly possessed by lawabiding citizens for lawful purposes around the time of the founding,” Justice Serge Georges Jr. wrote in the opinion .
The law, enacted in 1957, prohibited the possession of a switch knife or “any knife having an automatic spring release device by which the blade is released from the handle.”
But a man challenged the law in 2020 after he was charged with carrying a dangerous weapon. Officers found the switchblade on him while intervening in an altercation between him and his girlfriend.
The Massachusetts Judicial Court ultimately sided with the man, vacating the charge.