NOTE: USCCA Customer Engagement team members get a lot of questions, and they pass a good number of them along to Concealed Carry Magazine Senior Editor Ed Combs. If you have a question, you can either ask it below or email it to editor@usconcealedcarry.com. We, of course, cannot guarantee answers to all questions — Ed’s a pretty busy guy — but we’d love to help you out with whatever’s stumping you.

Jared Blohm
Managing Editor
Concealed Carry Magazine

Are Switchblades Legal? And If They Are, Are They Good for Concealed Carry?

That’s a tough one, and best addressed by opening with a reminder that I am not, nor have I ever been, an attorney.

That said, “legal” can have different meanings here. It may be 100 percent legal for you to own an automatic knife, but it may not be legal for you to carry it on your person outside of your residence where you live. As with so many other areas of self-defense, the best answer to the first part of this one can probably be found on the other end of a few phone calls to your local county sheriff’s office and a lawyer who practices in your area.

The fact is that laws surrounding automatic knives vary widely throughout the U.S. and are constantly changing. Many state and municipal “anti-switchblade” laws were passed in the wake of a 1950s moral panic kicked off by an article in Woman’s Home Companion called “The Toy That Kills” by some crackpot named Jack Harrison Pollack.1 (He was a clickbait pioneer back before actual CLICKbait even existed, responsible for such other classics as “The Shame of Our Local Health Departments” and “Six Ways Your Vote Can Be Stolen.”) As was his intent, America’s parents freaked, goaded on by switchblades’ appearances in B-level hot-rod movies. A convenient scapegoat for juvenile delinquency had finally been located.2

Automatic Knife Bias

What was once a common sight in farming, hunting, camping, fishing and knitting (yes, really) was now the worst threat to our nation’s children since polio. Legislators reacted accordingly. And these 60-plus-year-old laws are now being recognized for the bizarre relics they are. Some of these laws have been repealed, but some of them have not.

Along those lines, some persons both inside and outside of the legal system don’t consider all “switchblades” to be created equal. If you show some do-gooders a knife that looks like a thousand other folding knives (but happens to be automatic) it may or may not offend his or her sensibilities. In fact, to the untrained eye, a great many automatic-opening knives look no different than standard modern pocketknives save for a small button on one side. If, however, you show that same individual the style of automatic knife made famous by movies like Rebel Without a Cause, he or she will all but recoil in terror. As with brass knuckles, the sight of such a thing just screams “CRIME” to a certain type of worrywart.

No, that isn’t reasonable. But I want you to be able to effectively defend yourself as efficiently as possible, both in a practical sense and in a legal sense. If you want to collect classic autos from the days of yore, that’s your business. But do what it takes to ensure you’re never forced to use one to stop an attack. As with brass knuckles, there are just too many better options. I would direct you to some of our materials on how to best select a defense-oriented knife. And we’ve got a ton of excellent edged-weapon content by Michael Janich, founder of Martial Blade Concepts, in the Concealed Carry Magazine digital archives.

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Carrying a Switchblade for Self-Defense

There are all kinds of arguments as to whether an automatic knife is a good choice for everyday carry, but much like the revolver-versus-semi-auto handgun debate, what works best for you will depend on your specific situation. With training, most people can learn to deploy a non-automatic knife more than quickly enough for self-defense.

Automatic knives are almost always more expensive than their non-automatic counterparts, which will be a factor for many defenders. And there is the ever-present concern of mechanical safeties to prevent the knife from being unintentionally activated in your pocket. You need to weigh all of these factors — as well as the fact that whichever style of knife you choose, you will need to train on it — before deciding on which knife to carry. That goes for whether you intend for it to serve as a backup force option or simply a daily tool. Either way, don’t let the first time you try to use it be during an emergency.

What matters isn’t that you carry the exact style of knife someone on the internet says you should. What matters is that you find a knife that fits your hand well, that you can safely use, and that you will actually carry every day. As with firearms, nothing is more important than whether you have a knife when you need one. And as with firearms, the humble little number in your pocket always beats the super-machine that you left at home.

Endnotes

1 Jack Harrison Pollack, “The Toy That Kills,” Woman’s Home Companion (November 1950): 38-39, 88, 109.
2 Zac Whitmore, “Why Are Switchblades Illegal?” Blade, January 28, 2019, https://blademag.com/knife-history/why-are-switchblades-illegal.