Yesterday, the National Rifle Association filed an amicus brief in Knife Rights, Inc. v. Bondi, urging the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas’s decision upholding the Federal Switchblade Act (FSA).
The district court determined that the plaintiffs had standing to challenge only the provision of the FSA that bans interstate commerce of switchblades, and upheld that provision. The district court assumed switchblades are “arms” and recognized that some right to purchase arms is covered by the Second Amendment. However, the court reasoned that because the FSA prohibits only interstate commerce (leaving intrastate commerce unaffected), it is not a total ban and therefore not sufficiently burdensome to even invoke the Second Amendment. Therefore, the court avoided evaluating the FSA under Bruen’s history and tradition test.
The NRA’s brief argues that all arms regulations must be justified by historical tradition under Bruen, including laws regulating commercial transactions. Lower courts cannot carve out certain regulations and insulate them from the proper constitutional inquiry. What is more, evaluating how severely a regulation burdens the right to keep and bear arms is one of the metrics used to determine whether a modern law fits within the historical tradition of arms regulation—the severity of the burden does not determine whether the right is implicated in the first place.
Please stay tuned to www.nraila.org for future updates on NRA-ILA’s ongoing efforts to defend your constitutional rights, and please visit www.nraila.org/litigation to keep up to date on NRA-ILA’s ongoing litigation efforts.
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