It's good that you found slipjoints able to suit your needs, but passing judgement on what everyone else should or shouldn't like based on your own seemingly narrow view of utility is arrogant, to say the least. Many so-called "tactical" features have now become almost ubiquitous amongst folding knives (thumb studs, some jimping for better grip, better handle design/materials, varied blade designs, etc). Those things may have originally seemed tactical but they have also been found to have many practical uses on a day to day basis, depending on the needs of the user. Your post also implies there is no real use for a knife in today's urban environments, but you really can't speak for anyone but yourself on that point. I have lived in the country and in the city and have always found many uses for a knife as a daily tool, so to state that people don't need them is rather presumptuous. I regularly find many uses for a folding blade which I don't need both hands to open and which I don't need to dig around in a pocket for, and the availability of those options has been driven by the new and innovative ideas which were brought by blade makers who pushed the boundaries. This isn't to say there are not companies that gear their marketing towards mall ninjas and take things to a sometimes laughable level, as we all know, but using that one extreme merely builds a strawman argument to support the rest of your personal opinions on blade design.
If you read my post carefully you'll see I wasn't passing judgment on what people should or shouldn't like. My post was referring to "tactical" as marketing hype designed to sell a product. I didn't talk about "tactical"
features or specific knives at all. My post was entirely about the
idea of "tactical", and I gave a possible explanation as to why "tactical" knives are so popular now, which is, to put it succinctly, that for many people the
idea of a knife has drifted from being a
useful everyday object to an object upon which to project fantasies. Marketing knives as "tactical" helps make them "cool" so people who have no use for a knife as a
useful everyday object or
tool will buy one anyway as a
toy. Look at pretty much anything made by Dark Ops, for example. There's a reason slipjoints aren't marketed as zombie killing "tactical" death blades...
Once again, this has
nothing to do with people who buy a knife to use it as a
useful everyday object. One-handed opening, a locking blade, a pocket clip, etc, are useful features. I do enjoy my Spyderco Sage 2 and I carry it several times a week. Is it "tactical" because I can open it with one hand?
My specific uses do not require a "tactical" zombie-slaying knife. People who buy a "tactical" knife for use as a
tool to fulfill a specific everyday use and who actually understand and use knives aren't buying into the hype I was discussing. I would imagine all but a handful of people on a knife enthusiast forum don't fall for the marketing hype I was discussing. I was talking about the general population and trying to give an explanation as to why so many companies make knives and market them as being "tactical" without ever defining what that is. In general the term is nebulous precisely because it lets people fill in the blank with their own imagining.
Once again, this isn't passing judgment on people who buy knives for self defense, combat, military uses, or any other informed purchase. I'm talking about people who buy the Mtech knife because "it looks SO COOL".
