

“The 007 was actually a knockoff of a KA-BAR model from the Sixties of much better quality,” he explains. Steven Dick, who for years was the editor of Tactical Knives magazine, confirmed for The Martialist that the design isn’t original. At first glance, it resembles an elongated Buck 110, once the standard by which rocker-bar locking folding knives were measured.

There’s nothing remarkable about the 007 as a design. Much earlier and more famously, movies featuring switchblade-wielding juvenile delinquents drove the many bans in the 1950s on what was then a common, cheaply made, cheaply constructed pocketknife. The South African piece, “ Knives out for criminals,” is a great example - because the cheap, commonly available Okapi knife is popular with the criminal class, the knife itself has been blamed for crime. It’s been done with firearms countless times, such as the furor over “Saturday Night Specials,” and it’s been done with knives. Vilifying a tool for the actions of human beings isn’t new. Various authorities decried the knife’s prevalence among the criminal class, even as New York’s counterculture embraced it. That resulted in media denunciations of the knife, prompting parents throughout the New York area to confiscate 007 folders from the city’s youth. As the knife proliferated, it inevitably became popular with kids and criminals alike - the people who most often gravitate toward cheap tools.

Every corner store sold these crude, wood-handled, rocker-bar locking folding knives. During the 1970s, however, it was plentiful and cheap, particularly in the New York City area. It isn’t even a particularly well made knife. The infamous “007 Knife” isn’t a gravity knife or a switchblade.
