Your watching a crime show on TV. The story follows a pair of detectives and things get gory--a body was found, the person was shot. A few minutes later on the show, they are at the medical examiner's office and out on the slab is a grayed body, split open, stem to stern with a bone saw. The detectives have a look of mild disgust on their faces as the body. Then, for dramatic effect, the medical examiner is poking and prodding inside, sending waves of revulsion out towards the detectives and the viewers. Then, in a point of gallows humor, the poking and prodding continues in graphic fashion, only now the TV medical examiner is drinking a cup of soup in one hand and poking innards with the other. The cup of soup's contents look a lot like the pooled fluids in the corpse and the rookie TV detective goes off screen to puke.

In real life this would (probably) never happen, but medical examiners do deal with corpses in a way that most people find odd, to say the least. Similarly, sanitation workers at plants jump into "the fresh" all of the time, without much regard for what it is, aside from their safety gear. Folks at chicken plants debeak chickens like folks assemble cars. This is the whole premise of the TV show Dirty Jobs--our context can desensitize us to our surroundings and our behavior.

This leads me to the term "sheeple" (one of my two least favorite words used by the gear community, "pimping" is the other).

I absolutely HATE this term. In fact, its very existence is an indictment of the knife community. Guess what? Not everyone is comfortable with knives. That doesn't make them a wimp or a moron. It makes them different from you and me. Their context is different. My family has gotten used to me carrying and fidgeting with a knife, but not everyone has that context to draw on. And while I think the demonization of objects is stupid, I think being insensitive to others is even dumber.

Part of this is an issue of being conscientious of others. I don't want to be the guy that purposely takes up two parking spaces. I don't want to be the guy that gets his mail in his underwear, a la Tony Soprano. I don't want to be the guy that screams and yells at his crying kid in a store. Being part of humanity, being with others, means, that on some basic level human decency makes you, on occasion, think of others. So when you want to open a pack of gummy snacks with your Microtech Scarab and you are doing so in a crowded park full of families, think twice. Be discrete. Don't be THAT guy.

The other part of this is much more self-centered. Members of a community are, for better or worse, seen as representatives of that community. All gun owners are branded by the media and politicians by of the actions the least responsible gun owner. And when that person inevitably makes bad choices the government steps in. Over the years, government's track record of managing and dealing with discrete issues like this has been--well, there was only one Amendment to the Constitution ever repealed...So flipping your Woods Titan in Target is not just inconsiderate, its the kind of stupid behavior that inches us closer to more dumb legislation (see: the Switchblade Act).

They aren't sheep people because of their antipathy or discomfort with your knives. Being overtly intimidating by playing with knives in an obvious and inappropriate way is both inconsiderate and the kind of stupidity that invites legislative action. And that mindset starts with a word and that word is Sheeple.