Ritter, an Arizona journalist and outdoorsman, founded Knife Rights in 2006 after he was riled by an article in The Wall Street Journal that he felt unfairly stigmatized knives as a societal threat. “I basically had an epiphany,” Ritter said. “There was not an NRA for knife owners.”
Knives, especially switchblades, are in fact heavily regulated in many states and on the federal level with the Federal Switchblade Act, which bans the introduction of those “automatic” blades into interstate commerce. The federal act was passed in 1958, at the height of public fears over street toughs and juvenile delinquency, as epitomized by movies such as The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause and musicals such as West Side Story.
The movement, Ritter says, came of age in 2009 when it beat back an attempt by the U.S. Customs Service to expand the definition of what constitutes a switchblade for importation purposes to include so-called tactical knives, small blades that can be opened with one hand, but that lack the triggering mechanism of switchblades. “Eighty percent of the knives sold in the U.S. could have been illegal,” Ritter says.
The following year brought the push to pass “preemption” laws at the state level, laws that would supersede local ordinances regulating knives, as well as laws that would legalize the sale of switchblades within state lines. The effort brought successes in states such as Alaska, Kansas, and Indiana. Ritter’s group also helped defeat a bid by Nevada to ban knives longer than 2 inches.
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