Banned for nearly 70 years, automatic knives quietly return with bipartisan support
By David S. Rotenstein
NewsWorks Lab contributor
Donald Wright, 22, died early on Easter morning in 1953 when a teenager stabbed him with a switchblade knife in Pittsburgh’s World War II-era Glen Hazel public housing project.
Within days, Pittsburgh City Council outlawed switchblades, making the city one of the first in Pennsylvania with an automatic knife ban. A statewide ban followed three years later.
“It was just kind of silly,” said John Sullivan, who served on the American Knife and Tool Institute’s board of directors, which counts repealing automatic knife bans as one its top priorities. “Somebody could be traveling to a Bass Pro shop or something in Tennessee and buy a knife and then go home and have it be illegal.”
Many bans against automatic knives date to the 1950s when a moral panic swept the United States as journalists and legislators, partly fueled by Hollywood and a popular Broadway show, clamored to stigmatize and criminalize switchblades, experts said.
A NewsWorks Lab analysis of crime data shows that the number of knife crimes remains low compared to those involving handguns and firearms – and remains relatively unchanged in Pennsylvania since the ban was lifted.
People use knives to commit about 1,500 homicides in the United States annually, according to a 2022 National Institutes of Health study. By comparison, people used handguns and firearms to commit 8,580 murders last year, according to FBI data.
Law enforcement data do not break down whether the type of knife used was an automatic one or other knife type.
In Pennsylvania, 38 people used a knife to commit a murder in 2021, the year before the ban was lifted; last year, 38 people used a knife to kill someone – although the overall number of murders declined by a third to 414, the FBI records show.
Pittsburgh data show knives were used in five violent incidents in 2025, compared to four in 2021; the number of homicides dropped to one last year from three the year before the ban was lifted.
“I spoke with a lieutenant in our Violent Crimes Division, and he was not aware of anyone being charged with being in possession of a switchblade anytime recently,” Pittsburgh Public Safety spokesperson Cara Cruz wrote in an emailed response to questions. “If it was decriminalized by the state, Pittsburgh Police wouldn’t enforce a city ordinance on it.”
Knife experts and enthusiasts said switchblades are no more dangerous than ordinary folding knives. Because switchblades typically have smaller blades of four to five inches long, they might be less deadly than a longer bayonet or Bowie knife, historian Clayton Cramer said.
“Once it’s extended, there’s really no difference than the other short knife,” he said. “The lethality of a knife is generally dependent on the length of the blade.”
Pittsburgh ban
Wright’s murder in 1953 provided the catalyst for Pittsburgh’s switchblade ban.
According to testimony by Wright’s friend James Burke, Wright was sitting with him on a wall in front of Wright’s Glen Hazel home at 12:15 am. Wright, who was white, allegedly heard a rock being thrown against a nearby house.
He and his friend then saw a group of boys running down the street. The ensuing fistfight turned deadly when Clayton Woodrow Covington, who was Black, stabbed Wright with a $5 switchblade knife.
Newspapers dubbed Covington the “switchblade slayer” and the group he was with that night a “gang.” Covington pleaded guilty and in September 1953 was sentenced to the Camp Hill juvenile detention facility.
It took five months for the criminal case against Covington to conclude. In the court of public opinion and in Pittsburgh City Council chambers, however, a swifter verdict was rendered against switchblade knives.
A coroner’s inquest had recommended a grand jury indictment against Covington.
“We also recommend that the Legislature of Pennsylvania take immediate action to make it illegal to sell or possess switchblade knives, and also to make it illegal to carry long-bladed knives of any kind,” reads the coroner’s jury verdict released April 23, 1953.
Pittsburgh City Solicitor Anne X. Alpern sent a draft ordinance to the Pittsburgh City Council on May 11, 1953. Council approved the measure two weeks later, and Mayor David Lawrence signed it into law June 5.
Wright’s murder also spurred South Side Democrat Elmer J. Holland to introduce a bill in the Pennsylvania Senate April 13, 1953, banning automatic knives, specifically switchblades. In a speech to his Senate colleagues, Holland described Wright’s murder.
“In Pittsburgh last week, a man was stabbed to death by a gang of boys who were terrorizing the community,” Holland said. “One of the male resident [sic] of the community went out to protest the gang of boys. One of the boys immediately pulled a switchblade knife and buried the blade into the heart of that man.”
Despite the high emotions and support in the Senate, Holland’s bill didn’t become law.
Three years later, in 1956, the push to ban switchblades reignited as cities such as Philadelphia, Lancaster and Reading passed ordinances outlawing the knives. The statewide ban easily passed in both houses, and Pennsylvania Governor George Leader signed it into law on April 4, 1956.
Pennsylvania became one of 40 states at the time to fully or partially ban the sale and possession of automatic knives. In 1958, Congress passed the federal Switchblade Act, making it illegal to manufacture switchblades to be transported and sold across state lines.
Long history
Switchblade knives were invented long before lawmakers started banning them.
They originated in Europe in the 18th century when English, German and Spanish craftsmen made the first automatic knives, according to Richard Langston’s 2001 book, “The Collector’s Guide to Switchblade Knives.”
Mass production in factories using standardized parts after the Civil War made it possible to manufacture and sell more automatic knives. In 1883, George W. Korn of New York City received a patent for a pocketknife that included what he called a “fly-opener” and a lock, which allowed a user to release a spring-loaded blade by pressing on a lever in the handle.
Korn was a German immigrant who moved to Chicago and then Little Valley, New York, where he founded the Korn Razor Company.
George Schrade, another inventor, received a patent in 1892 for an improved pocketknife featuring a blade that opened automatically and that locked in place while open and closed. Schrade’s factory in Walden, New York, became one of the first places to mass produce switchblades.
Additional knife works soon began competing with Schrade, including W.R. Case & Sons Cutlery Company in Bradford, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1889 in Little Valley, New York, where Korn had his factory, Case relocated in 1905. It still makes knives – but not switchblades.
Popular culture
Historians and knife aficionados agree the criminalization of automatic knives happened very quickly, between 1950 and 1958, and that popular Hollywood movies, news reports and one Broadway show helped sensationalize the knives and crimes tied to them.
Doug Ritter, the founder of Knife Rights, a nationwide group that works to overturn automatic knife bans, blames one journalist in particular: Jack Pollack wrote an article titled the “The Toy That Kills” in the November 1950 issue of Woman’s Home Companion, which went out of print in 1957.
“This new threat to our children’s safety is a pocketknife called a switchblade,” Pollack wrote.
He focused on the speed that blades are released and painted a picture of switchblade knives as tools with one purpose: to maim and kill people.
Historian Cramer and legal experts who have written about knife laws point to movies such as “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Blackboard Jungle,” both of which came out in 1955, and the musical, “West Side Story,” which opened on Broadway in 1957.
“The problem is with almost everything that Hollywood does,” Cramer said, “if there’s some way to make it more exciting and more interesting to look at, they will do that.”
Television played a role too. On the eve of Pennsylvania banning automatic knives in 1956, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s new TV critic Harry Harris wrote in his first column about violence, and specifically switchblades. He inventoried all the violence he witnessed in a single day’s viewing.
“Deep-dyed villains of various sizes and shapes committed more acts of violence than we could count,” Harris wrote. “Actual deaths included 12 by shooting, two by stabbing … There were numerous mere woundings, via guns, switchblade knives [and] daggers.”
New Jersey attorney Paul Clark, who studies the history of knife criminalization and has written legal journal articles about switchblades and bayonets, said knife bans date even earlier.
He connects them to cultural biases such as earlier English laws against the sgian dubh, or “black knife,” that Scottish Highlanders traditionally wear, and the dirk, a longer Scottish blade.
“Way back in the 1700s, for instance, certain traditional Scottish weapons were banned, and they’re still banned,” Clark said. “In New Jersey, it is illegal to possess a sgian.”
Clark, like others who say switchblade bans unfairly target specific groups, said he thinks that Black people were falsely associated with automatic knives too.
“There’s no doubt, there’s a long, long history of this where majorities see a minority group that they don’t like,” he said. “They see something associated with that minority group and say, we’ve we got to punish that.”
Lawmakers unite
State Rep. Martin Causer, a Republican from Turtlepoint, Pa., who represents parts of the state’s most rural communities, and state Sen. Sharif Street, a Philadelphia Democrat in the state’s largest city, found themselves on the same side of legalizing automatic knives.
Causer’s district comprises parts of Cameron, McKean and Potter counties along Pennsylvania’s border with New York. It also includes the Case knife-manufacturing company.
Sullivan, who was the company’s director of sales and marketing, had reached out to the lawmaker.
“It started with a meeting that I had with officials at Case,” Causer told NewsWorks Lab. “They brought to my attention that automatic knives were prohibited from decades ago, and that the prohibition was putting them at a disadvantage from other states.”
Ritter’s group, Knife Rights, is also part of the loose coalition that has successfully lobbied to repeal knife bans in more than 40 states. Their efforts gained momentum in 2008 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller that private citizens, not just militias as written in the Second Amendment, could possess ordinary weapons.
Ritter formed Knife Rights after reading a Wall Street Journal article 20 years ago.
“I realized that there was no organization here that would fight the demonization of knives in general and things like switchblades in particular,” Ritter told NewsWorks Lab.
Causer’s bill to eliminate the automatic knife ban was working its way through the Pennsylvania legislature in 2021 and 2022, around the same time Street introduced a Senate bill that focused on social justice.
Street wrote in a 2021 memo when he introduced his bill that the ban led to higher arrests of Black Pennsylvanians carrying automatic knives: “This is especially true for young Black men who are more likely to be stopped by police.”
The Pennsylvania House approved Causer’s bill, 202 to 1 – with Delaware County Republican Rep. Christopher Quinn casting the lone dissent – and the Senate unanimously approved it. Gov. Wolf signed the bill into law on Nov. 3, 2022, and it went into effect 60 days later.
Today, only two states – Minnesota and New Mexico – still prohibit the possession, purchase and sale of automatic knives, according to the American Knife and Tool Institute.
Many state and local laws remain on the books nationwide restricting possession and sales of knives, as well as knife-blade lengths. The federal government ban on transporting switchblades across state lines for commercial sales remains in effect.
Pocket jewelry
Though it’s now legal to buy and carry automatic knives in Pennsylvania, as long as you’re not committing a crime, finding a place to buy one as an impulse purchase remains challenging.
Many hardware stores sell pocketknives, but not automatic knives. Some gun and sporting goods stores sell them online, but not in their stores. They’re easier to find and cheaper online, store owners and managers told NewsWorks Lab.
Mount Oliver’s Miller Ace Hardware sells a variety of automatic knives, including switchblades.
“The governor raised the ban on them,” co-owner Steve Miller said. “When I found that out I was like, I always wanted one when I was a kid. So, I brought them in and they took off.”
Out-the-front knives, which eject a blade directly from the handle when someone presses the trigger, are his bestsellers.
“Most of the time they break them – in-out, in-out – like a fidget spinner,” Miller said. “So, that’s the one I sell the most.”
Unlike handguns, there’s no registry of automatic knife buyers. A post to a Reddit knife group looking for Pittsburgh residents who bought automatic knives after 2022 yielded one response.
A Wexford man who asked to remain anonymous said he wears his switchblade like a piece of jewelry.
“There’s a real dearth of male accessories,” he says. “I’ve heard people refer to it as pocket jewelry, and I think that’s a great term because there’s definitely utility going on there. Most of the time it’s a fidget tool.”
NewsWorks Lab is a public-benefit company owned by Trib Total Media to produce high-impact, accountability journalism as a free, open-source resource. You may find more information at NewsWorksLab.com.
David S. Rotenstein and Sophia Lucente are contributors to NewsWorks Lab.
Copyright NewsWorksLab, LLC 2026
