The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has agreed to re-hear a case about Hawaii’s ban on butterfly knives, also known as balisongs. The decision comes after the Court’s 2023 three-judge panel decision which previously struck down the ban.
Chief Judge Mary Murguia vacated the panel’s previous decision, thereby allowing another test for the scope of the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen. The panel had cited this ruling as the authority to strike down Hawaii’s ban.
Butterfly knives are a type of pocket knife with two handles that can be easily opened. For the past 30 years, they have been banned in Hawaii. Various states have imposed restrictions on the knives and they’re outright banned in several countries across the globe. The case against the ban arose in 2019 when two Hawaii men initiated a lawsuit, under the claim that these restrictions were unconstitutional prohibitions on their rights to use the knives in self-defense.
The 2023 panel decision stated that butterfly knives were “bladed weapons [that] facially constitute arms within the meaning of the Second Amendment.” It also held that “Hawaii had failed to prove that [the ban] was consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of regulating weapons”. Hawaii countered in its petition for a rehearing that the panel had misapplied Bruen to bladed weapons; it argued that the court should have asked whether butterfly knives were commonly used for self-defense.
The inadequacy of the panel’s application of Bruen ushered in a wave of criticism, instigating a new approach to addressing Second Amendment constitutional issues. Consequentially, lower court cases started ruling on the constitutionality of state laws ranging from assault weapons to ammunition background checks.