The bottom line
A unanimous Ninth Circuit panel upheld California’s concealed carry ban on switchblades in Knife Rights, Inc. v. Bonta, decided January 30, 2026. The ruling is technically narrow, but it is built on a legal fiction: the panel treated a law that bans all possession, sale, purchase, and transfer of switchblades as if it were only a concealed carry regulation, then found historical support for the invented narrower version. The case was brought as a facial challenge when an as-applied challenge almost certainly would have succeeded, and now California’s switchblade ban has a Ninth Circuit precedent behind it.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What the law actually does
California Penal Code § 21510 prohibits carrying a switchblade knife with a blade two inches or longer on your person or in the passenger area of a vehicle in a public place. It also prohibits selling, offering for sale, loaning, transferring, or giving any such knife to any other person. California Penal Code § 17235 defines a switchblade as a pocketknife with a blade that opens automatically by the force of gravity, centrifugal force, or by any pressure applied to a button, spring, or other device attached to or part of the handle.
This is not a narrow concealed carry regulation. It is a near-total prohibition on the commercial existence of an entire category of knife. You cannot buy a switchblade in California. You cannot sell one. You cannot transfer one to your friend. If you somehow have one, you cannot carry it in public. The only thing the law does not explicitly ban is owning one at home, which is generous in the same way that a law permitting you to own a car but prohibiting its sale, purchase, and use on roads is generous.
The Ninth Circuit panel, writing through Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, chose to focus narrowly on § 21510(b), the concealed carry provision, and upheld that single subsection as consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of regulating the concealed carry of dangerous weapons. The panel expressly declined to rule on whether the prohibition on sales, transfers, or other forms of possession is constitutional. It acknowledged, in its own text, that the holding is narrow precisely because the facial challenge required plaintiffs to prove the law is unconstitutional in every application, and plaintiffs could not do that for every provision of the statute simultaneously.
The facial challenge problem
This is where I need to slow down and explain something that actually matters for understanding why this outcome happened and what it means going forward.
There are two main types of constitutional challenges. A facial challenge argues that a law is unconstitutional in all of its applications, to everyone, always. If you bring a facial challenge and lose, you lose because the court can identify at least some application of the law that would be constitutional. An as-applied challenge argues that the law is unconstitutional as applied to you, in your specific circumstances. It is a narrower claim, harder for courts to dodge, and if you win, you set precedent that protects people in similar circumstances.
Knife Rights brought a facial challenge. The Ninth Circuit panel found that even if the concealed carry of switchblades is constitutionally protected for most people, there might exist some person for whom concealed carry of a switchblade could be regulated consistently with history, which is enough for the facial challenge to fail. The court acknowledged this explicitly: “Plaintiffs’ facial challenge fails because they cannot establish that California’s switchblade regulations are unconstitutional in every one of their applications.”
The court then dropped a sentence that should make every Second Amendment lawyer reading the opinion wince: the ruling on the facial challenge does not preclude an as-applied challenge on different facts.
In other words, the court is telling us directly that an as-applied challenge would have a better shot. If Knife Rights or another plaintiff had challenged the law as applied to, say, a law-abiding adult who wants to carry a switchblade for legitimate personal use, a challenge targeting the specific conditions of their situation rather than the entire statute in all applications, the outcome might have been different. The panel essentially said so.
How the Ninth Circuit misread Bruen here
The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen established that firearms regulations must be consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation in the United States. The Court held that the government bears the burden of identifying a historical analog, and that analog must be relevantly similar to the modern regulation, not just superficially related.
The Ninth Circuit found historical support for the switchblade concealed carry ban in 19th-century laws restricting the concealed carry of Bowie knives, dirks, daggers, and similar bladed weapons. The panel concluded that switchblades are relevantly similar to those weapons because both are bladed instruments that legislatures have historically treated as dangerous.
There are serious problems with this analysis.
The weapons banned in those 19th-century laws were large fixed-blade knives, capable of being worn on a person but obviously visible as weapons. The Bowie knife in particular was a large, sheath-worn blade commonly associated with dueling and frontier violence. The historical regulations targeting it were directed at a specific, visually distinctive weapon that functioned primarily as a fighting tool.
A switchblade is a pocketknife with a spring mechanism. It fits in a pants pocket. Its blade is defined by California as any blade over two inches long, which includes most utility knives. It is primarily a tool with an automatic opening mechanism. The “dangerousness” that animated historical Bowie knife regulations has no obvious analog in a small folding knife that opens with a button rather than a handle pull.
More fundamentally, the historical concealed carry laws the Ninth Circuit cited did not ban sale, purchase, and transfer of those weapons. They restricted how the weapons could be carried in public. That is a critically different kind of regulation. California’s § 21510 does not just restrict how you carry a switchblade. It prohibits the entire commercial transaction. No historical analog the panel cited comes close to that level of restriction.
Knife Rights argued in its en banc petition, filed March 18, 2026, that the panel “transformed California’s categorical ban into a fabricated concealed-carry law, then decided the case solely on that invented theory while ignoring the full scope of the challenged ban.” That is not an unfair characterization of what the panel did.
The deeper absurdity
Setting aside the legal mechanics for a moment, let me say what I actually think about this law, because the legal analysis can obscure how genuinely strange it is that California banned switchblades at all.
Switchblades are not particularly dangerous weapons. A folding knife with a spring mechanism is mechanically indistinguishable from a folding knife you open with your thumb, except that it opens faster. If the concern is that knives can be used as weapons, every kitchen, every toolbox, and every camping supply store in California is stocked with instruments that are more dangerous than most switchblades. The idea that the public is made safer by banning a knife because it opens automatically rather than manually is not a safety policy. It is aesthetic regulation, the banning of something that looks threatening to people who find the mechanism unfamiliar.
The UK experience is instructive here. Britain has among the strictest knife laws in the Western world. You cannot carry a blade longer than three inches in public without a legitimate reason. The country has responded by experiencing epidemic levels of knife crime for two decades, including acid attacks and screwdriver assaults as substitutes, because people determined to commit violence do not put their plans on hold because their preferred implement is illegal. The weapons change. The violence does not.
California has a homicide rate, a theft rate, and gang violence problem. Banning switchblades addresses none of them. The person who commits a stabbing in Los Angeles does not first consider whether their preferred knife is compliant with § 21510. If they did, they would use a kitchen knife instead, as people in places with stricter knife laws demonstrably do.
The only honest explanation for why California banned switchblades specifically is that they look scary to people who have seen too many 1950s greaser movies. That is the full legislative history.
What the en banc petition means
On March 18, 2026, Knife Rights filed for rehearing en banc, asking the full Ninth Circuit to take up the case. The petition argues the panel violated binding Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent by treating a total ban as if it were a carry regulation, and by failing to properly apply Heller and Bruen. It also argues that the opinion creates a conflict with how other circuits have analyzed Second Amendment challenges to weapon prohibitions.
En banc grants are rare. The Ninth Circuit takes a small fraction of en banc petitions, and recent Second Amendment cases have not produced a consistently favorable track record at the full court level. This is the Ninth Circuit. Their baseline instinct is to find ways to sustain California’s regulations, and the facial challenge framing gave them an unusually clean escape route.
The better long-term path is a new case structured as an as-applied challenge, targeting a specific person in a specific set of circumstances who is being deprived of a constitutional right by California’s switchblade prohibition. The panel’s opinion almost invited that case by noting it leaves as-applied challenges available. Someone should file one.
Why this matters beyond switchblades
The Knife Rights v. Bonta decision is not about switchblades in isolation. It is a demonstration of how courts can use the facial/as-applied distinction and careful selection of historical analogs to uphold any weapon prohibition they want to sustain, regardless of what Bruen actually requires.
The logic works like this: when confronted with a broad ban, narrow your analysis to its most defensible provision, find some 19th-century law that restricted something vaguely similar in some way, declare that tradition sufficient, and then dismiss the challenge because the plaintiffs could not prove the law is unconstitutional in every conceivable application. The weapon being regulated does not matter much. The same intellectual moves could be applied to any bladed weapon, any particular firearm type, any accessory that lawmakers find politically convenient to target.
That is not what Bruen was supposed to produce. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion in Bruen was explicit that courts could not simply hypothesize a historical regulation that might exist. The government had to produce actual historical evidence of a relevantly similar restriction, and the burden was on the government, not the plaintiff. What the Ninth Circuit did in Knife Rights was identify historical concealed carry restrictions on large fighting knives, declare a two-inch spring-assisted pocketknife relevantly similar, and call that sufficient.
The Supreme Court is going to have to address this methodology eventually. Whether they do so through Knife Rights specifically or through one of the assault weapons ban cases working their way through the courts is an open question. But the underlying problem is real: lower courts are using Bruen’s historical methodology as a tool for sustaining the regulations they were already inclined to sustain, rather than as a genuine constraint on legislative power over arms.
Knife Rights v. Bonta is a small case about a not-particularly-dangerous knife. It is also a preview of every other Second Amendment fight coming in courts below the Supreme Court level, and the preview is not encouraging.
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