We’ve been waiting for years for something like Viramontes to come before the Supreme Court. While a few years ago, the outcome might have been more in doubt, the Supreme Court of today looks little like the one that decided Heller and McDonald, and that’s not a bad thing.
While both of those cases are important and clearly benefited us, the Court was a less certain place for Second Amendment issues, and they were almost never heard. We went more than a decade before we got another gun case.
Today, though, we’re finally getting what we wanted, and both sides already have a very good idea of what the broad strokes of the ruling are likely to be. Bans on so-called assault weapons, as they currently stand, will go the way of Charlie Sheen’s career.
But as the good folks at Knife Rights remind us, Viramontes isn’t just about guns.
While the number of firearms is easily determined due to how they are regulated, that is not true of virtually every other “arm,” including knives. The numbers of knives, impact weapons, stun-weapons and self-defense sprays, for example, are not authoritatively tracked in the same way as firearms. There is concern that SCOTUS could take a very limited view of the commonality test; one that relies strictly on hard numbers or which sets a very high limit to meet, because that is what they are presented with in these cases with millions of AR-15 rifles possessed.
Our Second Amendment challenge to the Federal Switchblade Act relies on a variety of means to determine commonality because hard numbers like with firearms are more difficult to determine. Beyond historical numbers from testimony back when the Federal Switchblade Act was being considered in Congress, we also rely upon the categorical commonality of “knives” or even “pocketknives” in general and the jurisdictional commonality that the knives banned are legal is the vast majority of states. These latter two means of determining commonality are true of many other non-firearm “arms.”
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We are proud to join our Second Amendment brethren being one of 43 briefs submitted in support of the Petitioners. It is also great that the United States’ Amicus Brief also touched on this issue in a manner that supports our view. Hopefully, SCOTUS takes note and gives us a decision that works for all of the arms protected by the Second Amendment.
Knives are arms. Many troops during GWOT would buy knives not to serve as tools, but as weapons. They may have been envisioning scenarios that would never come to pass…or they might have known good and well that things can go sideways, and a knife only runs out of ammo when you run out of blood pressure.
We — and yes, I most definitely include myself here — often ignore knives as arms. We might make fun of the Brits for being as paralyzed by knife fears as anti-gunners here are about “ghost guns” or whatever, but we don’t actually take up the fight we should.
Knife Rights is a group that often has the gun rights world’s back, even if we do a crummy job of reciprocating it sometimes.
The truth is that if the anti-gunners are going to try to use Bowie knife bans to justify assault weapon bans, we need to be a little more proactive in protecting knife rights as a whole and in working to overturn statutes that infringe on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
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