[Gear Review] KA-BAR Model #1214 Utility Knife

I'm a lover, not a fighter. Let's get that out of the way. Owning a knife doesn't necessarily make a dude a "knife guy". You know the ones I mean, who buy the sort of shit you see on Mall Ninja just because it looks cool. The guy who gets his knife out whenever he's drunk just to swoosh it around and admire it, making everybody nervous.

That's why I didn't get a larger blade and didn't get anything with any decorative elements. I like boring but extremely durable, well made tools. That's what a knife is, really. It's a tool. You know what's also a tool? Anybody who treats knives as an extension of their masculinity.

I expect to do a lot of sawing with this to make tinder out of branches, and the reviews all say it excels at this purpose. You really need a full size tool for that, the fiddly little ones in a pocket knife are of no real utility based on what little I remember of my time in the scouts.

This knife has a kraton g handle and a kydex sheath. Sounds like some futuristic shit Superman would recover from the debris of Krypton, but really just names for a particular formula of rubber and plastic.

Likewise, the "Cro-van" steel used to make the blade sounds like some shit a barbarian would use. I looked it up and it's a good strong alloy but comes out with ugly visual imperfections, hence why they paint the blade black. The paint is likely to chip as the knife gets used but I am indifferent to that so long as it never impedes the functionality.

It has a good solid feel in the hand, the weight is nicely balanced. I can see why this is widely used and came highly recommended to me by the subset of my friends who are probably on a variety of government watch lists. I didn't know my ass from my elbow concerning knives until a week or so before I chose the one I would buy.

I spent that time researching the matter, and all signs pointed to KA-BAR. What do I actually need this for? Cleaning fish, sawing branches, typical camping shit. But also self defense of course, or I'd have chosen separate, specialized tools for those tasks.

In my home state the gun laws are so strict that you basically have to wait until just before someone kills you to shoot them, and even then you can expect to be bankrupted by the legal expense of defending your decision.

However the laws concerning knife ownership are the most relaxed in the US. There's only a small selection of knife types you cannot own and the ones you can are legal to conceal or open carry just about anywhere.

I would be devastated if I ever had to harm anybody. But as you'll recall from other articles of mine, my neck of the woods has a severe criddler problem. Criddlers are the worst, nastiest, most fucked up and insane tweakers. I've run across their tents and shacks out in the woods more than I'd like.

Now to me, no matter how far someone falls, they are still a beautiful living emanation of the universe. They are another cell in the body of the same organism as me. The thing is, they often don't know that. So they are much less concerned about harming me than I am about harming them.

There's a lot of steps you can take to de-escalate violence before it happens though, and my hope is that simply seeing that I'm armed will be ample deterrence. I've had a couple of sketchy encounters which shook my faith in total pacifism but am still determined to cause as little harm as I can while I pass through life.

Probably some will read this and think "Pussy, a knife is no big deal. You have the right to defend your own life." It's difficult to explain to people who live that way how transformational it is when you've tasted concentrated cosmic gentleness, and swore that you would never be the same stubborn, scared little creature ever again.

So it was a difficult decision indeed to equip myself with something usable as a weapon. I thought long and hard about it. About what it would mean for me, now that violent self defense was on the table. About what sort of person that makes me, or what I might be setting myself up for.

In the end, I think the fact that it has provoked such intense sobriety in me is a strong sign that I can trust myself not to misuse this thing out of fear. Long gone are the days when fear played a central role in my decision making process.

Anyway, it's a rather solid and well made knife for the $68 I paid. The edge is a little biased to one side which many people that own this knife apparently correct using a sharpening kit, but for the uses I intend, I doubt it will make much of a difference. Stay tuned for more!

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^{...and Stay Cozy!}