"Like a monkey with a screwdriver..."

So, let's talk about knives. Once upon a time, I used to look at a tactical folder as though it were a weapon which, when one thinks about it, is sort of odd.

Unless you live in the rare jurisdiction that bans pepper spray and firearms but is hunky dory with you carrying some one-hand opening, locking folder with a big ol' meat-eating blade, it's hard to imagine the scenario where you're going to put it into use. 

I suppose you could theoretically pull it out and wave it around as some sort of deterrent? But there's a lot of fantasy stuff out there where people are imagining squaring off with some attacker in a scenario reminiscent of West Side Story meets a "Teach Yourself Escrima at Home" DVD from Paladin Press.

The one really legitimate use for a knife is to defend against a gun grab or otherwise force an attacker off you that has grabbed you by surprise from behind.

And frankly a folding knife clipped to your strong-side pocket just isn't all that hot for that use. For starters, it assumes that your strong side arm is free and doesn't have 180 pounds of assailant wrapped around it.

Further, even if you do get the knife out of the pocket and into your hand, there's still the problem of deploying the blade. Sure, there are thumb studs and Spyder holes and flippers and assisted openers and even straight-up automatic ones with pushbutton releases. The problem with all those is that you have to get one grip on the knife to get it out of your pocket, shift your grip on the knife to get your thumb or forefinger into place to deploy the blade, and then shift your grip again to get the knife positioned in your hand to go to work with it.

And you have to perform all that hand jive while rolling around with Sumdood who's trying to yank your arm out of the socket and conk your head on the pavement. Don't drop it!

About the only folders that mostly evade this handicap are ones with the Emerson Wave or a facsimile thereof, which mostly open reliably and automatically as they're being yanked out of the pocket. Mostly. Under ideal conditions I'd say I probably get it right about 95+% of the time. Rolling around with Sumdood is pretty far from ideal conditions, though.

Hence the popularity of the small centerline fixed-blade knife. Carried in whatever way makes it best accessible to either hand...behind the belt buckle, IWB, even in some circumstances as a neck knife...the idea is that it can be reached with either hand and yanked out ready to go, already in a stabbin' grip. The purpose of these small knives isn't to square up with some other knife guy like you're Jim Bowie on a sandbar, but to do like the guy in the white shirt is doing in the above photo: Make like a monkey with a screwdriver to get the other guy to let go of your gun and/or you.

The Shivworks store has a few really excellent offerings like the classic Push Dagger or the Clinch Pick. Those are outstanding, and probably the go-to choices, but if you're on a budget, the TDI knives from Ka-Bar work great and are available from BezosMart with free Prime delivery.

(Also, get yourself to ECQC.)

Shrinking knife...

I love the Emerson wave opening feature on Spydercos, but I don't use them for any sort of tactical reasons. It's just handy to have a knife that pops open automagically when you yank it from your pocket, without having to operate any buttons, flippers, thumb studs, or whatever.

As a result, over the years the one I carry has gotten smaller and smaller, starting with the big ol' Endura on the right, and then the Delica in the middle (which shows the wear of nearly a decade of carry) and finally the little Dragonfly, a gift from a friend, which I've been carrying for something like a year now.

Blade lengths: 2.3", 2.9", 3.8"

BezosMart appears to have them on sale at the moment, maybe for Labor Day or something. The current price on the Endura at the link is less than I paid for it from Amazon in 2013...

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Hey, look!

So, the Spyderco is a better knife than the Victorinox—if all you need to do is cut stuff with a knife. The Climber, on the other hand, does knife stuff pretty OK, as well as being able to do a reasonable job with a lot of other chores, too.

Of course, the Victorinox is only doing a “reasonable” job with all those screwdriver or bottle-opening chores. People who need a tool that can do really good work with the knife blade as well as handling all kinds of normie tool chores will usually pick a multi-tool like a Leatherman MUT or Gerber Center-Drive. Sure, they’re big and bulky, but they can do both knife and tool stuff really well.

By now, probably half the readers are glancing at the top of this column and wondering if “HANDGUNS” is some new spelling of “POCKET KNIVES” with which they had previously been unfamiliar. Gentle reader, I have a point! (And not simply the one on the knife.)

Carry guns come in all kinds of flavors.Probably the statistically most common ones these days are one of three kinds: teeny little micro-.380 ACP semi-automatics of the Ruger LCP variety, small-frame snub-nose revolvers or itty-bitty micro 9 mm pistols like the Kahr PM9 or Glock G43. These handguns are like the Spyderco Delica. They only do one thing—serve as a defensive CCW piece against would-be human assailants at fairly close distances—very well.

Some pistols are multitools, others are single-purpose...

Executive Poker

I've written about "gent's folders" before; smaller pocket knives that aren't all aggro and tacticool-looking.

Most of the ones I've played with so far were the short-bladed kind, which are not only non-threatening looking but also legal in the widest variety of places.

If you're not constrained by regulations regarding blade length or a locking blade on your folder, there's also the "stylus" type of gents folder, which I hadn't really played with before, so I decided to give the CEO model from Columbia Knife & Tool a whirl. (I sold some old ammo at this weekend's otherwise dismal Indy 1500 gun show and decided to share some of my small windfall with Brad, the knife guy.)

As the name would suggest, this style of knife is very slender, and will generally slip into any pen pocket large enough to accommodate a fine writing instrument, like that Monteverde Regatta.

You could carry it in your pants pocket, I guess, but I think its natural home would be a shirt or jacket pocket where pens are normally carried.

The blade is a bit over 3" long (3.11", to be technical) which can run afoul of local regs in places like Boston or Chicago. It's made of 8Cr13MoV steel, which is a lower-tier Chinese stainless that's roughly similar in properties to Japanese AUS-8... you're not getting exotic alloys at this price point. It's less rust resistant than good ol' 440C but easier to sharpen and less likely to chip in my experience.

There are complaints from reviewers at Amazon about the lack of a flipper on this variation (they make one with a flipper for a couple bucks more) but I prefer the slimmer profile of the flipperless one. This isn't a tactical knife.

The pivot is smooth and fitted with a ball bearing; a good shove on the thumb stud will often pivot it right into the locked position, although this is not an assisted opener. The pocket clip makes it sit nice and low and only someone who's paying a great deal of attention to your chestal region will notice it's not a pen. The lock is positive and the blade on my example was nice and sharp right out of the box. It's well up to normal everyday knifely chores.

Given its intended use, I give it a solid B grade. It's nothing exotic, but it's good-looking in a very clean and simple way, and the price is right.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #253...

Hotel room nightstand shot from TacCon: Taurus 856 T.O.R.O. with a Holosun 507k in a PHLster City Special, six rounds of Hornady Critical Defense 110gr +P in an eight round Tuff Strip, my trusty POM spicy treats dispenser, 500 lumen Surefire EDCL1-T, and a waved Spyderco Dragonfly.

Click the links to steal this look!

(Do I think the Hornady 110gr +P Critical Defense is the bestest load for the .38? Probably not, but it's easy to get the dot sighted in with, and reloads are speedy with those pointy bullets. Its performance is certainly adequate, especially if you're not particularly worried about needing to defeat vehicular barriers.)

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Rage

A guy was passed out behind the wheel of his car on a busy highway bridge in Florida. What happened next was wild.

The incident started when a 35-year-old Tampa man called "Driver 1" was found slumped over in his car in a southbound lane of the Howard Frankland Bridge a little before 9:30 a.m. ET Tuesday, the Highway Patrol said.

A second car, driven by Ahmed Gahaf, 40, of Tampa, stopped in front of Driver 1 to see whether he was OK. That's when Driver 1 "awoke and drove forward, colliding with Driver 2's vehicle," the Highway Patrol said.

"Driver 1 reversed and attempted to drive around Driver 2's (Gahaf's) vehicle" and then "collided with Driver 3's vehicle which was passing the incident," it said.

Driver 3 was Scruggs, who "stopped, exited his vehicle, approached Driver 1, broke out a side window and began to stab Driver 1 multiple times with a pocket knife," the Highway Patrol said.

I can't find that the police have said why the dude was passed out in his car. Maybe it was a medical emergency, maybe he was on the nod from the dope, whatever. At any rate, he was obviously disoriented when he came to and tried to drive off and bumped into another car, whose driver basically immediately escalated to stabbery.

Road rage is way up. Don't expect someone to react to a fender-bender with a calm exchange of insurance info. Be alert for weirdness.

Stay alert for it, too.

Claude Werner refers to an incident where there was a bit of shouty road rage in a Home Depot parking lot in Brooklyn. It appeared to have deescalated, with both parties entering the store and doing their shopping...

"He was trying to go into a parking space...I pulled up behind the guy, he had to back up and I was impeding on him trying to back up," McDuffie said. "I didn't realize it, I blew my horn for a second and we exchanged words."

He said both drivers got out of the car and McDuffie said he tried to quickly diffuse the situation before it escalated.

McDuffie said both he and the suspect appeared to move on from the issue and they continued their business inside the store.

The couple left around 12:15 p.m. and pulled over on Willoughby Avenue. That's when McDuffie said he felt something hit him and the gunman opened fire before running away.

Claude wisely suggests that, after a confrontation like the one in the parking lot, you leave and essentially conduct the sort of counter-surveillance that a spy would when trying to detect and shake a tail. 

Don't assume that just because you've let it go, the other party has done likewise. Remember, they were willing to escalate to the edge of violence over something minor already, and there's no reason to assume that they've suddenly become more rational. Leave, and ensure they are not following.

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Pocket Popper

Although there are definitely more pocketable options these days...

Everything in the photo is a smaller, lighter, more pocketable alternative to something bigger. 

Obviously there's the Beretta 3032 Tomcat, the subject of an upcoming review in RECOIL: Concealment.(The photo is an outtake from the shots I did for the article.)

Then there's the Surefire Sidekick, my little rechargeable 300-lumen key fob. There's also the always-handy POM pepper spray, with probably ninety percent of the capability of my trusty Sabre Mk.6 at a fraction of the size.

Finally is the svelte little Spyderco Roadie. It's got good-looking Italian style and was designed specifically to comply with the proposed (but, alas, withdrawn) TSA rules that would have allowed small penknives on planes again. It has a 2" non-locking slipjoint type blade that also features a finger choil forward of the pivot to prevent accidental closure should you have to put it to non-penknife type uses. Between the short blade and the lack of a mechanical lock, it should be legal in most any jurisdiction that allows any kind of knives at all.

(The watch is a Bertucci field watch, if you're into that sort of thing. I'm not really watch people but it's lightweight and looks cool.)

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Pocket Popper Days

I remember my Beretta pocket popper days. Here's a photo from late 2001...

I carried a Beretta 950BS Jetfire in the flap pocket on the front of my leather bomber jacket back when I used to commute on motorcycles. Looking back, it was probably largely a "ballistic rabbit's foot", since I carried it hammer-down, necessitating thumb-cocking on the draw. That's always an iffy proposition when in a hurry, especially with such a tiny gun.

Further, .25ACP is pretty much the only handgun cartridge that deserves all the bad press it gets. There isn't any really "good" load in the chambering, just some that are less bad than others. If you gotta carry a deuce-five, load it with ball.

I replaced it with a Beretta 3032 Tomcat, one of the early skinny-slide models. I sometimes get nostalgic for the Tomcat, but if I were to get another one, it would definitely be a newer stainless "Inox" model with the chonkier slide.

If you want a real otaku-like deep dive on the history of the Tomcat, there's one at this link.

I still have that little CRKT K.I.S.S., and it still has the scuffs on the pocket clip from that motorcycle wreck on Peachtree, those twenty-three summers ago.

(I still have that Kershaw Chive, too, but it lacks the emotional significance that the scars give the CRKT. Plus I got to meet Ed Halligan at BLADE Show back in '02 and show him the K.I.S.S. and the scuffs on the clip.)

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #235...

Between the six-shooter, a sight with batteries, a Surefire handheld with only 500 lumens, and a pocket knife with a sub-3" blade, I was eliminated by ninjas thirty-seven times just while taking this photo.

A fellow victim of ninjas, Sherman House, has some thoughts on the 856 TORO here:

Thanks to a volatile gun industry, capacity restrictions, modern/effective defensive ammunition and more states granting either Constitutional Carry, or carry permits, there has been a big uptick in revolver sales and use. Some are calling this a REVOLVER RENAISSANCE. I think the proliferation of better/improved designs, and the simple utility of revolvers has recaptured the imagination of the shooting public, and the relatively small national firearms training community (Tom Givens estimates that the national training community that progresses past a permit class is approximately 10,000 members strong) who NEVER STOPPED using revolvers can now be public about it in ways that actually encourage revolver neophytes to join the dozens of us (literally DOZENS OF US) revolver users.

You should be reading his blog. He's a clueful dude.

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Pocket Sharps

Oh, man, just this morning I learned that Spyderco is making a version of their Dragonfly 2 with the Emerson waved opener.

I long ago switched from the waved Endura to the smaller waved Delica, but that waved Dragonfly would be super easy on the pocket.

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Fallacy of the Excluded Middle

There's a piece over at GAT Daily that discusses how "knife" in the gun world has come to be synonymous with "tactical folder", which is to say aggro-looking things with textured scales in Tactical Dirt Colored G10 and meat-eating 3"+ blades.

I certainly have several knives that fit this description, but I don't generally carry them anymore. The closest thing is probably the rather understated-looking Bestech Kendo I'll bring to SHOT, because I like the way it looks and if it disappears over the week's travels I won't be crushed by its absence.

It may be slim and understated looking, but a 3.75" blade makes for a noticeable pocket anchor.

For day-to-day use, I've even retreated from the waved Spyderco Endura I used to carry to the smaller waved Delica.

Even these middlin'-sized Spydercos can be a little startling to people uncomfortable around anything weaponlike, what with the way they deploy instantly with an audible *snap* on being yanked from a pocket.

This socially-acceptable angle is what caused the author of the GAT piece to wax eloquent about grandpa's slip joint pocket knife.

I’m talking about the gentleman’s pocket knife. If your dad didn’t carry one of these, your granddad almost certainly did. These are the smaller, slimmer 2-3 in bladed knives from Buck, Case, and Great Eastern Cutlery.

Most of the folks from Gen-Z forward will likely be most familiar with this knife format once I say “Swiss Army Knife”

These are far from tactical. You need both hands to open the knife, there’s no pocket clip, the blades are relatively thin, and the knife doesn’t lock open. But they carry a lot of advantages as well.

Firstly, one of the biggest benefits is the fact that they’re not tactical. Pulling out one of these in mixed company is more likely to spark a conversation than it is to make someone uncomfortable.

I get that in certain quarters of the Manliness Movement, it's fashionable to cosplay an imaginary version of the Fifties, and that Old Spice has staged a comeback alongside the fedora, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with LARPing as grandpa, but it is possible to have a small, elegant gent's folder that looks like it was designed in this millennium. You don't have to go retro for a nice looking bit of pocket jewelry.

Benchmade has been making attractive small gent's folders for decades, but you don't have to spend a bunch on a pre-prodution McHenry & Williams Benchmite or 1st Production Terzuola Park Avenue to get a sleek little pocket knife. The current CRKT catalog, for instance, has the slick-looking but inexpensive Dually, with a sub-2" blade (legal in even Chicago and Boston). It even has a built-in bottle opener, in case you aren't far enough into the grandpa-LARP for twist-off tops.

Just because you need a small, classy knife, it doesn't mean you have to start wearing white socks and sandals and pulling your trousers up to your armpits.

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Speaking of knives...

I've mentioned before about how blunt trainers for the Spyderco "waved" Endura and Delica are discontinued, uncommon, and expensive when you can find them. They're so uncommon and expensive that literally the first piece I ever wrote for Shooting Illustrated Online was on how to make an improvised "wave" for a regular Spyderco trainer.

Well, good news everyone!

Kershaw is making an Emerson waved trainer and they're seventeen bucks on sale at BezosMart right now.

It's obviously not the same as a waved Delica, but it's roughly comparable in size and shape and, most importantly, deploys identically from a pocket or waistband.

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Just Walk Away

In a video clip shared by Chris Fry of MDTS which I'm only going to link rather than embed for obvious reasons, there's a good lesson in how quickly an altercation can turn deadly.

You'll notice that one group of dudes is trying to walk away, while the other is just not willing to let it go. Even after a dude draws a knife, you've got that one big guy striding right at him with his chest thrown out in the posture of someone who's used to things going their way because of size and strength.

Oops.

One quick flick of the knife guy's hand and next thing you know, homie is bleeding out on the pavement. The thing that gets me is that he had to walk over to the guy in order to get hisself killed.

Ugly and completely avoidable. In the words of the great Warrior Poet, Humungus...

I was today years old when...

...I learned that Victorinox makes a Swiss Army knife version specifically for cheese enthusiasts, and it is dubbed the "Cheese Master".

Ugh, the internet.

"Why didn't he fire a warning shot?"

Okay, first, because even warning shots land someplace. Whose living room would you like it to land in? Second, because she was in the middle of stabbing someone, so there wasn't a lot of time for warning people.

"Why didn't he shoot her in the leg?"

Oh, man, when are we going to rid people of the damfool notion that it's possible to shoot someone a little bit? A bullet in the knee can leave someone crippled for life, possibly resulting in amputation. A bullet in the thigh (or, like I unbelievably heard someone suggest, the "butt") can sever the femoral artery and cause them to bleed to death right there on the spot. Also, she was in the middle of stabbing somebody, so there wasn't a lot of time to play eeny-meeny-miney-moe with bullet placement.

"Why didn't he deescalate?"

The time to deescalate someone is before they start stabbing people. Once they're actively trying to stick a knife in someone, which is lethal force, it is generally accepted that you may use drastic measures before they can finish killing that person.

I don't know everything that led up to the shooting of that girl. Supposedly she was the one who called the cops. Maybe she got tired of waiting and decided to take matters into her own hands? There's also the phenomenon where people call the police and automatically think that it activates the "I'm the Good Guy" light over their head, that the cops will show up, divine that they are the injured party, and back their play. This is how the occasional homeowner gets shot by responding officers when they wander out looking for the burglar with a gun in their hand.

There's a lot here we don't know, and it sure seems crappy all around, but an LEO shooting Person A to stop them in the act of using clearly visible lethal force against Person B is usually pretty cut and dried.

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Time Travel

The tiny little strip mall ACE Hardware a couple doors down from the drug store where I cashiered back in high school had a teeny little gun/knife counter crammed in the corner. They carried Rugers, mostly, as well as the full Buck catalog. 

There were two items in that showcase I used to sometimes go daydream about on my breaks: A BuckMaster knife and a Ruger Old Army in stainless. They were expensive, but not unattainably so. A more responsible me could have rolled my pennies for a few paychecks and bought them both. I don't know what I would have used them for, but, hey...what if the Russians had invaded or something?

Looking at eBay and GB now, holy yikes, do I wish I had bought them back then.

Yeah, yeah, I realize that they probably have barely kept pace with inflation and if I went back in time, I should buy Apple & Microsoft, not LARP-y knives and guns, but still.

Besides, you'd have to pay with coins and singles if you went back in time, because our current five-dollar-and-up bills would look like counterfeit money back then. Can you buy stock shares with bundles of singles and rolls of quarters? I mean, I guess you can, but it would feel weird.

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I just don't get it.

A blogger is asked by a coworker to sharpen a knife:

"I can't do anything with this but throw it away."

We live in a time when Amazon will deliver a decent CRKT or Kershaw that will last for years of use to your doorstep for less than the price of lunch for two at a middlin' decent sit-down restaurant. (Way less if you don't order a beer.)


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Hey, look!

• The Gripknife (It was hard to write that one with a poker-faced neutral tone.)


• Full Conceal M3D-S6


• Wild West Guns multi-caliber Co-Pilot cased kit

I LOL'ed and LOL'ed...

...because it's true.

OOCQOTD: "Throwing knife people: The knife people of knife people."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 17, 2019

Took a knap.

There's a gentleman who sets up in the Pioneer Village at the State Fair every year and demonstrates flint knapping. Every year I tell myself I'm going to buy one of his pieces just for the cool factor, but I never got around to it until this year.

This is some lovely rainbow obsidian from northern California that's been knapped into a broad blade about 3.75" long and affixed to an antler handle.

What caught my eye was the fat, asymmetrical antler handle that fills the fist nicely, the right hand in a forward grip and the left in a reverse. It feels kinda like a clinch pick.

The rainbow obsidian is translucent and, when the light hits it just right, has the multicolored internal shimmers that give it its name. (Also, I'm kinda just got by how pleasant the bokeh is on this Zeiss 32mm f/1.8.)
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