I am not sure (and very nervous about those laws), but I think that semi-automatic knives would be "flipper" knives and other assisted-opening knives. I assume manual (bolt action?) knives are the ones that cannot be converted to high-capacity and are not easy/quick to open.
I blame entertainment media (including West Side Story) for the silly bans on switchblades:
See post 38 which shows evidence that the play “West Side Story” WAS probably the main factor in getting them banned. Interesting.
Just like what sunk the nuclear energy industry in America wasn’t the incident at Three Mile Island (where the emergency shut-down procedures worked) - but the movie “The China Syndrome” which came out just a couple of weeks before the incident.