Federal judges just treated switchblades and body armor as protected “arms,” raising the stakes for the Supreme Court’s coming fight over AR-15-style rifles and Cook County’s ban.
Two federal rulings this week pushed the Second Amendment well past conventional firearms. The Fifth Circuit struck down a federal limit on interstate commerce in switchblade knives. A federal judge in the Western District of New York voided the state’s restrictions on personal body armor. Both courts held that the items qualify as constitutionally protected “arms.”
Fox News reported that gun-rights advocates see the decisions as a preview of the larger battle the Supreme Court is preparing to hear in Viramontes v. Cook County, which asks whether AR-15-style rifles fall inside the Second Amendment’s protection.
The timing matters. Lower courts are applying the text-and-history test from the Supreme Court’s earlier gun cases while the justices prepare to decide what counts as an “arm” in the modern arsenal.
The Fifth Circuit ruled that the Federal Switchblade Act’s restrictions on interstate commerce violated the Second Amendment. The court found switchblades are commonly used arms the Constitution covers. It also found the government failed to show a sufficient historical tradition supporting those specific limits.
In New York, the state argued body armor was merely a tactical accessory to a firearm, not an “arm” itself. The federal judge rejected that claim. The court held body armor falls within the historical definition of arms recognized in the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. New York, the judge concluded, had not shown a historical tradition that justified banning civilian purchases.
Under the framework from Heller and the later New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision, courts first ask whether the Second Amendment’s text covers the weapon or conduct. If it does, the government must prove its rule fits the nation’s historical tradition of arms regulation. In both cases this week, the governments came up short on that second step.
Heller established an individual right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, including self-defense. It protected weapons in common lawful use while leaving room for longstanding limits on “dangerous and unusual” weapons. The decision also recognized that “arms” can include both offensive weapons and defensive armor. It did not directly address switchblades or body armor. These new rulings fill that gap with the Bruen test.
The Supreme Court is preparing to hear oral arguments in Viramontes v. Cook County. The case challenges Cook County’s assault-weapons ban and centers on whether AR-15-style rifles qualify as protected arms.
The Seventh Circuit had concluded that AR-15-style rifles are comparable to machine guns and therefore sit outside the arms protected by the Second Amendment under Heller. Second Amendment attorney George Lyon called that comparison flatly mistaken.
Lyon said the governments in the switchblade and body-armor cases failed to identify sufficiently similar historical laws. He framed the constitutional burden clearly once the text is met.
"Once what you want to do is shown to come within the text of the Second Amendment, the presumption is that the regulation is unconstitutional,"
Lyon added that the Supreme Court case will confront the Seventh Circuit’s approach directly.
"The current case at the Supreme Court, Viramontes, will address that because the Seventh Circuit had taken the position that because AR-15s are ‘like machine guns,’ they don’t constitute an arm as defined under Heller,"
He did not say much on the lower court’s logic.
"That was just totally wrong in my view."
National Association for Gun Rights President Dudley Brown tied the week’s rulings straight to the high court docket. His group filed an amicus brief in Viramontes.
"The interesting thing about both of these cases is that they’re both going to be really decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Viramontes decision,"
Brown’s point is simple: a clear Supreme Court definition of “arms” will shape how lower courts treat knives, armor, rifles, and more.
NRA director of public affairs Justin Davis described a wider fight already underway. Courts are sorting suppressors, ammunition magazines, stun guns, pepper spray, and other self-defense tools alongside rifles.
"There’s a major discussion going on in the courts about what is and what aren’t arms,"
Davis rejected the claim that the Second Amendment froze in the 18th century.
"They talk about how the Second Amendment only applied to muskets because that’s what existed at the time of the Founders, but we don’t apply the First Amendment only to newspapers, books or speech in public forums,"
He finished the comparison with modern communication tools the Founders never saw.
"Social media, texting and phones didn’t exist at that time, either." "The world evolves, but the core fundamental rights never change,"
That argument tracks how the Supreme Court has treated other constitutional guarantees. Rights travel with technology when the underlying conduct stays the same. Self-defense does not vanish because the tool changed shape.
The same high court that will hear the AR-15 dispute has also moved on election-season questions, including when it let New Hampshire fully ban student IDs for midterm voting.
Voters and lawful gun owners both watch how the justices read constitutional text against modern rules. Clear lines beat shifting political preferences.
These switchblade and body-armor decisions do not end the larger fight. They show how the post-Bruen test works when governments cannot produce matching historical tradition. They also show how far some jurisdictions still push restrictions, on knives shipped across state lines and on armor ordinary civilians may buy.
Cook County’s ban and the Seventh Circuit’s machine-gun analogy now sit in front of the Supreme Court. If the justices reject that analogy and hold that common semi-automatic rifles are arms in lawful use, the ripple will reach far beyond Illinois. If they accept a narrow definition, lower courts will have fresh cover to treat popular rifles as outside the Second Amendment.
The court has already shown it will act on discrete midterm-related disputes, as when Jackson stood alone as the Supreme Court cleared New Hampshire’s student ID ban ahead of the elections.
Gun-rights groups are not waiting passively. The National Association for Gun Rights put its amicus brief on the record in Viramontes. The NRA is publicly framing the dispute as part of a larger catalog of self-defense equipment now in litigation.
Related Supreme Court election rulings keep the institutional pattern visible. The justices blocked student IDs as voter proof for the New Hampshire midterms and separately blocked a rush deadline on FCC ad rates in a midterm cash fight. Constitutional baselines, not emergency politics, are supposed to set the rules.
For now the record is concrete. Two federal courts this week treated switchblades and body armor as arms. The governments failed the historical-tradition test. The Supreme Court will soon decide whether AR-15-style rifles receive the same protection Cook County denied them.
Lawful owners and the states that regulate them both need a durable answer. The Second Amendment is not a museum label for muskets, and courts that treat it that way invite the justices to correct them.
