This article appeared in Knife Magazine in February 2025
Know Your Knife Laws – Why Even Liberals Should Hate the FSA
By Anthony Sculimbrene, Attorney and Knife Expert
Freddie Gray’s death in 2015 represents one of the most harrowing and powerful examples of a breakdown in the law and order that makes society possible. Gray, a black man, was arrested carrying a cheap, overseas-made assisted-opening knife. There was confusion about whether the knife was illegal—state law said it was legal, but a local ordinance could be interpreted to reach the opposite conclusion. Police used that strained interpretation to justify arresting Freddie Gray. He was forcefully handled and then placed in the back of a paddy wagon and was never seen alive again. There were no other charges, other than the knife possession, no other suspicions of wrongdoing, yet Freddie Gray, who was 25 at the time, died from a brutal series of injuries to his spine. No one was found criminally responsible for his death.
Freddie Gray’s arrest and death should be sufficient justification for everyone to support the elimination of the Federal Switchblade Act (FSA). More clarity in knife laws would have saved his life. Eliminating the FSA would prevent abuses like this from happening. The reasoning for that argument relies on understanding how police work occurs in the US.
For decades, police relied on investigation, witnesses, and detective work to determine when and how to arrest people. Two cases changed that in the mid-20th century. First, there was Miranda v. Arizona, which ostensibly limited how police could get confessions. Instead, it provided a road map for getting people to confess. There were rules prohibiting forced confessions before Miranda, some from the 19th century, but they were bright-line rules–for example, confessions obtained via physical force were barred. After Miranda, there was a boom in the use of confessions because now there was a path to obtain them legally. The bright line prohibition became fuzzy. Second, there was Terry v Ohio. In this case, the US Supreme Court outlined what was needed to detain a person, essentially lowering the bar to stop and arrest people by creating a half-step between arrests and letting someone walk free. Thanks to the US Supreme Court, almost every case nowadays is solved via confessions or Terry stops and searches (snitches being the third means of investigation).
Terry v. Ohio allows police to stop people suspected of crimes, but there is insufficient evidence for a full-fledged arrest. Put in terms used in the case, police can detain someone if they have reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in a crime. In Freddie Gray’s case, the reasonable suspicion that justified stopping him was an exposed pocket clip. That led to the discovery of the possibly illegal knife, which, in turn, resulted in Gray’s arrest and eventual murder. Case law makes it impossible to repeal Terry v. Ohio, but what legislators can do is limit the number of crimes so that police need actual harm and real emergencies before stopping people.
Outside of automobile stops, which are usually started for “erratic driving” or speeding, carrying weapons represents the easiest way for police to justify stopping people when they are just walking down the street, even if, like Gray, they are not doing things that are criminal or dangerous. Repealing the FSA would make knife-based stops very, very difficult to justify. Basically, police would be forced to stop people only if they believed the knife was involved in a crime. Put another way, if the FSA didn’t exist, police couldn’t stop people willy-nilly and pass it off as concern over carrying a knife.
Decriminalizing non-harmful behavior often allows police to focus on real crime. As states loosen laws around marijuana, more resources and attention can be devoted to murders, sexual assaults, and serious domestic violence. Additionally, repealing the FSA limits the grounds that allow bad apple-cops to stop people. Good cops will follow the evidence, as they should, but bad cops look for justifications to allow for their abusive behavior. Repealing the FSA will take away one very easy justification. Since those police abuses, according to studies, overwhelmingly target the poor and minorities, eliminating weak justifications for Terry stops, like, gasp, carrying a knife, should be an issue liberals support.
In a world of polarized politics, there are still a lot of things people agree on. We all want safe streets. We all want our kids and grandkids to have opportunities to succeed. And we should all want police to focus on crime and not on lawful knife owners. Liberals and conservatives alike have reason to support a repeal of the FSA. It is time for reason and not fear to govern knife laws.
Support the American Knife & Tool Institute’s (AKTI) effort to repeal the Federal Switchblade Act, a federal initiative by AKTI originally introduced in 2017. Sign up for email updates or join. You can contribute to the effort here.