What's Gerber's plan here?

[Higgins617]

Did anyone else see the new lines put out by Gerber? The U.S Folders and Ghostrike series, they look to me like they have pretty much no intention other than to be used as weapons and are marketed for the "modern-day tactical professional". What does that even mean?

The folders do seem to incorporate some much nicer steels though, so they have that going for them.

[cbl51]

This is something that has bugged me for a long time. The knife manufacturers are the industry worst enemy. To stimulate an artificial market and sales, they keep on pushing the envelope for the keyboard comando's and mall ninja's who think they need a knife to repel chinese paratroopers or be a character in some unreal video game. The ugly truth is, the bulk of the tactical knives on the market have nothing to do with real world cutting jobs and normal pocket knife carry.

They pay for product placement in violent hollywood movies and TV shows, young people get influenced and act like an idiot, and then they wonder why things get banned. It happened wityh switchblades after some 1950's movies made them the fashion of street punks everywhere. I was around for that, and remember it quite well. I was a teenage when cars had tail fins and duck tail haircuts were popular, so I have clear memories of punks with switchblades.

Gerber and other companies pander to the tactical crowd, so they will have only themselves to blame when some senator or congressmen want to impress his constituents on how well he's looking out for their safety, and introduce laws banning the knives. A great many of these knives have no useful use except for a weapon. And a knife makes a very poor defense weapon.

I look at the design of some of the modern knives and cringe. Thick blades, semi blunt points that are built to be strong enough to pry up the hatch on a Abrams tank. It's gotten silly. I grew up in an era that when a man had his pants on, there was a pocket knife in one of the pockets. It was always some sort of slip joint two bladed jack of some sort. A barlow, or a serpentine jack, or a pen knife. Truck drivers, welders, factory workers, farmers, soldiers. These men of my fathers generation and my grandfathers era did more real work back them=n than any 10 office cubicle workers of modern suburbia. If they needed something more than their two blade jackknife, then a different tool was needed. A knife was a everyday tool a man carried, and it was never thought of as a weapon, so a lock wasn't needed. A knife was thought of as a punks weapon, and I heard my dad and other family members speak of them the same way.

Gerber, Spyderco, and the other companies are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run. The rest of the country will go the way of NYC and the U.K. but the knife company owners will be so rich by that time, they will be retired to West Palm Beach by then, and not care.