The problem is that the knife behaved as it was designed to do. Pushing on the back of the blade when the lock release button is pressed is supposed to make the knife close. And this isn’t some non-obvious or non-intuitive piece of operation. This is “if you put the car in reverse and take your foot off the brake it will move backward, so make sure nobody’s behind you.” This is “if you fold the safety guard out of the way and shove a board into the saw with your bare hands, you might lose fingers”.

Yeah, this really sucks and it’s not fun, but, well…pay attention next time.

Interestingly enough, Alaska is the only state with a semblance of a loser-pays law.

I note a few points. The gut hook is on the back of the blade, a common feature. To use the gut gook, the blade is loaded “the wrong way,” against the lock. If the lock fails, the blade will tend to close, and your fingers are in the way of the closing blade.

Several things will affect the locking mechanism. The angles of the locking recess and lockback hooks need to be nearly square. A slight undercut will make the lock more secure, but harder to unlock. Dirt or pocket lint in the recess will inhibit locking. Wear will make the hookup less secure. The lockback release should be slightly recessed, but that makes it more cumbersome to operate, particularly with gloves on.

Using a gut hook as a line cutter is a fairly common action. This is the first time I’ve heard it considered dangerous.

Playing with the cheap lockback that I use for a letter opener, I found it surprisingly easy to inadvertently trip the release when holding the knife like Seavey showed on the vid.

This is why I prefer a fixed blade knife. In a folder, I prefer one with a separate hook blade.

I think Seavey has a colorable case.

ras: is it up for me too to determine if my supermarket meat is contaminated with salmonella? after all, i have decades of experience eating things.

Perhaps, but it all lies with whether or not the product was designed negligently, right? Nothing in this story says that it wasn’t. The details given strongly suggest that the knife had a safety design flaw. When that is the case, then a profitting entity has a duty of care.

Sure, I think loser pays would be reasonable reform.

Perhaps tool ownership should be licensed. We could have professional authorizers and standardized tests and penalties for no-compliance and everything, That way, no one would ever again try to butter their bread with a poorly-designed chainsaw because of some evil (foreign, easily sued) supplier.