Even easier - just pull the lock back with your thumb and forefinger and flip the blade shut.
ETA: The one thing I really like about this type of lock is that your fingers never have to be in the blade's path when closing it.
Yeah, that's why my Kulgera keeps finding its way back into my pocket and is used so often, pretty much everywhere. Open, cut, close, never leaving an opened blade around or anything. I guess that sounds simple to some, but honestly whenever I use a liner lock or a fixed blade anymore I always find closing or sheathing it to be really cumbersome comparatively.
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As far as the springs breaking, I don't really have much concern about that as far as reliability goes. I've had springs break on me on four separate occasions, and they never broke at the same time; the redundant spring design means that you'd have to have some kind of catastrophic incident where both springs failed simultaneously. The odds of that seem very low, and I think that the likelihood of anything like that happening without you knowing it would be slim to none, and if you know the springs are broken, then user intervention ( replacing springs, shoving a stick in there to secure the lockup) is very simple.
I don't really care about "lock strength", but obviously the axis lock is a very high-strength lock just by its design alone. I don't want to do a whole frame-lock vs axis lock argument here, but compare the diameter of the pivot and the lock-bar which secure an axis lock to the average thickness of the cutout on a frame-lock. I don't really think there's that much difference there considering the width of the cutout as well, so I don't think either has a higher chance than the other of breaking, but if I had to pick which I think would break first I'd say the rectangular form of a frame-lock cutout is going to fail before the cylindrical shape of a lock-bar would, so I don't really see why one would favor a frame-lock outside of the spring-failure worry.
I don't really think the merit of the AXIS lock are in its lock-strength though. I think the operation of the lock itself is where it really shines through. The strength of the lock-up itself is just a consequence of the lock design itself. I think if one were to set out to make an incredibly strong lock, the simplicity of the lock-bar just interfacing the tang wouldn't readily occur to most, and you'd wind up seeing something very over-built ( not to demean it ) like the Tri-Ad lock. So in my opinion the AXIS lock design is more focused on the way it deploys and closes than having tremendous strength in the lock-up, it's just the way they executed it is very simple, and simple designs are pretty easy to make strong. Interfacing the tang with the lock-bar makes for both the deployment features and a very secure lock-up.
