Originally Posted By: Pete
reply to earlier comment ...

"It's hard for me to imagine what advantage you get from speeding up the opening of your knife like that by a fraction of a second"

It depends on your situation, training and skill. Against unskilled opponents, esp. where you've got some reasonable maneuvering room, the drawing of your knife is less critical. But against a determined opponent (esp. at close range), or someone who knows what they are doing, those fractions of a second are vital. With the right training and practice, that wave feature on the Emerson knife could be a lifesaver.


If you have time to draw, you should have time for pre-emptive action (without drawing). At least in what I'm picturing anyway. Seizing the initiative may especially be crucial against trained assailants (i.e., better to take pre-emptive action than to draw and have to resort to reactive action). Maybe I'm missing something.

It still seems to me the time saved seems minimal. After some practice, you should be able to draw with the regular knob or hole almost as fast. It may take more effort than the wave feature, but you'll get there. The small time difference does not make me particularly want to run out and get a new knife. (And I always want to run out and buy a shiny new knife.)

I don't necessarily agree it's always the best to run away. Some people run faster than you do.

This sort of stuff is hard to discuss on the internet, and we should really stay away from becoming like one of those martial arts website where they practice time-honored art of word-do. Let me just reiterate the point I wanted to make (but probably obscured by all my talking): Get training, preferably a lot of training, if you want to use a knife for defensive purposes. Someone said owning a gun makes you armed no more than a piano makes you a musician. It's the same with a knife.