PC crap!

Originally posted by Keith Montgomery
It is looking more and more like knife lovers are going to have to become a secret society that meets in hidden away places and knows each other only by the rings they wear and a secret handshake.
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Or by our smell of TuffGlide and tattered, but sadly clipless, pockets...:)

Has anyone else ever gotten "the look" when browsing knife magazines? I sure have. I remember one time I glanced up and a woman was staring at me like I was something that just crawled out from under a rock. I am about as inoffensive looking as you can get, so at first I thought my fly was open or I had something hanging from my nose. But it had to be just the magazine that set her off.

Same thing happened when buying a gun magazine. I thought the clerk was going to refuse to pick it up in order to scan it or put on a pair of gloves first. Oh well.
 
Business is driven by one thing - profit. They will carry what sells, and strategically place on the shelf what sells best. Here in liberal NJ, I am not at all suprised to find the knife/gun mags (when I can find them at all) on the bottom shelf and pushed back in the fourth row, so that I literally have to get on my knees and risk bumping my head on the way out once I gran hold. I am glad at least to find them there. But, busines is business, and if enough Redbook/Rosie/Woman's Day - buying soccer moms object to the nasty weapons magazines, their market share will overrule ours, guaranteed. They are a much more desirable and profitable demographic than we are. Then you will need to go to a gun store to buy mags, oh, if you can find a gunstore anymore.
 
I realize that store owners have the right to sell whatever they want.It is my right to then decide whether I will choose to continue supporting that business. In taking knife magazines of the shelf it is my belief that Chapters is telling me that they think that there is something wrong with these magazines. I wonder if they also think that anyone that would read one of these magazines has something wrong with them?

I can also understand that a store will usually choose to sell items that tend to move the best. In the case of the knife magazines it would seem that Chapters does very well with knife magazines since they are always sold out of all titles before the next issue arrives. I have my doubts that this had anything to do with their decision.

John, I have been purchasing audio magazines from Front Page for the store that I manage. From this point on I will get my knife mags from either them or Hub Cigar, both of which are excellent stores. This does take me a lot more out of my way though and is a great deal more inconvenient.

Chapters has lost a customer over this no matter what the reasons for their decision are. A customer that spends a few hundred dollars a year at their stores. Hopefully it will end up costing them a lot more business than that.
 
I am one of those guys that used to carry my knife onto planes. Now I can't. I have to accept it. Those !@#$%^& hijackers gave knives a messed image. What can you do? We all have to make changes in these trying times
 
HotSwat: it doesn't mean that they should stop you from buying knife magazine either.
If the al-qaeda chooses to hack the airplanes, should we all ban all computer magazines now? or if they chose food as a weapon instead, should we all ban cook books now? if they all use Cosmo to do that horrific deed, should we all ban Cosmo now (well actuall I'd like to see Cosmo go away regardless ;)) ?
 
I'm reading a lot of good comments and give-and-take, but who here took the time to write to Chapters or call them and ask their policy on this (besides me, I mean)? By ranting here, guys, you're just preaching to the choir. Tell it to Chapters. I did.*








* No response back from them yet, by the way.
 
rant on

Twenty years ago, I used to buy gun rugs and other firearm supplies from Target. Now they are all self righteous about not stocking such items. But they do stock plenty of Cosmo, Redbook, and other garbage that ranges from erotic to *almost* soft core porn.

It's unbelieveable what some people/organizations get self righteous about. They peddle garbage, almost borderline smut for young teens to drool over, have CD's about killing cops, etc., then will not have legitimate magazines about knives and guns. Unbelieveable.

rant off.
 
It' amazing seeing that they all cater to the liberal, free thinking, God hating crowd with their books on witchcraft, casting spells, and all the other crap I normally see at Borders and Half Priced Books.

I too get some looks from people when I go to Borders to look at Soldier of Fortune or all the gun/ knife mags. Mostly they're from the college kid/purple hair/Birkenstock wearing crowd.

:barf:
 
I used to work for Barnes & Nobles when I was sending myself through the police acdamey, and would read gun and knife mags on my breaks. One day the woman re-stocking the mags said to me that we should not be selling mags about weapons. Then she said that it was OK for me to have them since I was becoming a police officer, but the public should not be able to have them. I was shocked! Its hard to believe that people can be that stupid! IMHO we would be better off with a better armed society if attacked by terrorists, then by a completly unarmed one. PC sheeple really seem to not understand that criminals can and will get weapons by any means, and restrictive weapon laws only hurt the lawful. Pretty soon we will have to registar with the government to buy gun and knife mags., and the court system will still be letting POS criminals charged with existing gun laws go with a "now, now, you need to stop doing that" and dismissing the cases. We have more than enough weapon laws, but the courts just let them slide. Oh well, rant off. (I know, went off topic a bit)

Reagan
 
Originally posted by Gutshot
But, We're gonna get a secret handshake? Cool!
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Yeah, but it's kind of tricky. Ya gotta be missing a finger or two and have band-aids on the others.
 
Wouldnt ya know, I just was in Borders looking around at the magazines, and yup the knife magazines are gone. There are still gun and hunting and fishing magazines, but the knife ones have "vanished". Oh, and of course there are twice as many "mens interest" magazines as there are of even news magazines.
 
Originally posted by Knife Outlet
I disagree, Gollnick. It would be a problem for government to tell us what to read or not to read. But business isn't government. These people can sell or stop selling whatever they want.
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Business IS goverment. And Goverment IS business...

So if some shop/chain decides to move in some direction, well, you just can go buy somewhere else, BUT when you see that a PC trend is supported by all major corporations AND Goverment (and I'm not saying this is what is happening YET on the World) you have to worry, cos small players are not always allowed to make their own decisions... So you might end up not having where to buy knives magazines (or anything else for that matters) if you just take a "I'll find some place else to buy them" position.

Take my word for it, if a Corporation/Goverment takes an unilateral desicion about something that bothers a big part of the population in their own benefit, its a good idea to remind them that many of us don't like it, cos otherwise you'll get up one day and you'll realize that things that a year ago thought unimaginables are already implemented...:(

NsB
 
Well, the official company position as to why these magazines are no longer available is that they are not selling in large enough numbers. I asked how every one of the magazines in the catagories of knives, guns and military such as Soldier of Fortune could possibly not be selling big enough numbers to continue bringing them in. I can understand that one or two might fit this scenario, but every one of them. The person I talked to said that all she could tell me is what head office had emailed her.

As far as I am concerned Chapters is telling me that they think that these magazines are unsavory and by association they are saying that people that read them are unsavory as well. They have lost my business and have produced a problem for themselves because I am going to get on my soapbox everytime someone asks me where they should buy books.

Rant mode off for now, but I am sure that the more I think about this the madder I am going to get. Time to go take a Prozac.
 
Originally posted by Keith Montgomery
Rant mode off for now, but I am sure that the more I think about this the madder I am going to get. Time to go take a Prozac.
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No offense, but forget the Prozac ~ it's time to post this story on every knife board, website and thread you can think of so we can get the word out to other knife enthusiasts. Granted other posters were correct in stating that as a business they have the right to carry whatever inventory they choose, but let's not forget that we as consumers also have the option to decide where to purchase our goods.

It's the same old story, the attempt by those with influence to mold society in their image, based on their beliefs, by limiting access or knowledge and restricting the availability of certain items. It's amatuerish social engineering and I find it absolutely disgusting.
 
I've phone up one of the stores in Chapters in Coquitlam and had questioned whether they have been pulling off all the knife and gun related magazines off the shelf, and she just said that there has been no policies concerning that. When I question her a bit further, she just avoided the question and just said rudely "Bye".
Certainly, I demand an explanation from them.
 
Originally posted by HotSwat
I am one of those guys that used to carry my knife onto planes. Now I can't. I have to accept it. Those !@#$%^& hijackers gave knives a messed image. What can you do? We all have to make changes in these trying times
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Actually we don't have to accept it. The NRA doesn't. And you can ask a good many congressman what happens when you cross the NRA. The problem with knives is that the AKTI does not have enough clout to do anything about the problem. We have three choices. Make the AKTI into a much more powerful lobby, create an alternate organization, or lose our right to carry knives.
 
Here's the response I got to my e-mail to Chapters:

<b>Thank you for writing.

We have indeed delisted some knife and gun magazines within our periodicals department. We have by no means delisted all of them, several titles are still available for sale.

We review all of our product categories regularly and cull what customers, through their purchasing habits, tell us they are no longer interested in and we expand those categories which are growing. We do this assessment on an ongoing basis. In other words, if sales of Canadian Living or Cosmopolitan magazine dropped substantially we would remove those titles and replace them with others that showed more promise in terms of sales. To give you a concrete example, we have delisted NFL Insider and Wizard magazines as well.

Should you have any further concerns, please feel free to contact us at any time.

Thank you for choosing Chapters Indigo Online.

Best regards,
Chapters Indigo Online
Customer Service Team
www.chapters.indigo.ca</b>
 
From the words of Keith, I think thye're hardly doing just that.
 
I sent this thread to Harris Publications. They put out Tactical Knives. I will post their response.

I also spoke to Steve Shackleford from Blade (Krause Publications). He said he did not know of this as a trend in US bookstores and was going to check into canadian stores.

mnblade, thanks for the post into akti's forum.

I saw the reference to AKTI becoming NRA'like.

We just had our board meeting back in Chicago. Jan Billeb is our executive director and is putting the minutes together. I will be posting a summary of that meeting on the akti forum when I get those minutes.

We have four committees. Membership, Legislation, Education and Promotion. We have missions for each committee. We have not had good fortune lining up regular members because we are not well known and there is a little bit of apathy in the knife world. We are trying to focus on getting the industry, from factories to custom knife makers to dealers to fund our efforts. People who make a living in the knife industry. Membership continues to rally the industry to get off our apathetic butts and step up.

Education and Promotion are both tasked with getting the message out that knives are tools that can be misused and should not be irrationally feared.

Legislation is working on Model Knife Legislation that can be added to the Model Penal Code and used by future lawmakers. We will also try to get knives removed from the list of "prohibited weapons" (like grenades, bombs, machine guns, etc). Knives are legitimate tools and criminals should be well prosecuted when they use these tools for crime. You can kill someone with a baseball bat yet bats are not on the list of prohibited weapons...

Please feel free to rattle your favorite dealers about being involved with AKTI.
 
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