I never understood the logic of banning automatic opening knives. Once again, I think it just boils down to the “scary” factor. If you think about it logically, a criminal using any knife in a crime is going to have ANY knife open and ready for use before he commits the crime anyway.
Mostly promoted by the play, then the movie “West Side Story”. It became part of the category of what I call “trendy” laws. Laws that generally make no sense, but legislatures like to go with trends. As they do not want to go to the trouble of writting new legislation, they change existing legislation that already exists a little, and push to pass it in their own state.
Examples of this are the stupid switchblade knife laws, the concealed carry laws, and a failed example, the “assault weapon” laws.