I do. A knife ain’t sharp till it can shave the hairs off your arm, dammit.
(I still smush my garlic and ditch the skin, mind)
I take a clove of garlic with some of the skin on it. I bend it or squash it a little with my bare fingers. The skin comes loose a little, and can be picked off easily. A lot more easily than peeling shells from hard-boiled eggs, which would be a whole other can of worms. I use a knife to clip off any of the rooty-part on the less pointy end of the garlic clove. Or sometimes I cut that end off first, cutting through the skin with a fairly cheap knife. Are we still talking about cutting through garlic skins or cutting through coconuts? Is garlic pretty much the same all over or are the skins grown in some regions that much thicker?
You might not be aware that some people claim smashing or crushing garlic is useful after the skin is off, even if you’re going to slice or mince the garlic. I don’t understand why they hype it like some advanced alchemical technique, which was why I asked. I had leapt to the conclusion that you were on Team Garlic Smash for that reason. I would apologize, except you deserve nothing after that “Ummmm” bullcrap. Good day, sir or madam!
Crazy, right? Yes, there are people looking to crush garlic with the flat of the knife, and advising suckers like me to do it that way.
Probably not all 102,000 of these results in a Google search for “crush garlic knife” are specifically explaining how to crush garlic with the flat of a knife, but I feel vindicated by the first page of results.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=crush+garlic+knife
Garlic actually does differ. Garlic in SE Asia tends to be very small, have purple paper around the bulb and have thin skin. These cloves can easily be used in regional cuisine with a good smash and without mincing. Here in the US, I often notice some cloves have tougher skins than others.
Making a single cut at the thick end of a clove is different from the multiple, closely-spaced cuts involved in mincing something. But if you want to use your cheap knife to mince garlic with the skin on, have at it… just don’t complain if your thumb finds it more dangerous than smashing cloves.
You might not be aware that this is a thread about removing the skin from garlic cloves, and that pretty much all comments in this thread about smashing it are related to removing the skin.
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Whenever I cook (as opposed to bake), I use 2-3 cloves of garlic. I can imagine doing something big enough that this would get its full usefulness but have yet to have a call for it in my home kitchen. I doubt it works well for just 2-3 cloves. 
That said, I’ve never found skinning cloves difficult enough to bother with a device or particular technique. Sometimes I cut off the end and use that to peel. Other times, the skin comes off without much fussing with blades at all.
Oh my gods.
I just used the knife technique for the first time on Saturday and never considered any danger. Sorry to hear about your scar.
I generally just peel by hand but the particular application I was using the garlic for really just needed the garlic to bust open and stay together (stuffing that and onions into a chicken where I didn’t plan on eating the “stuffing”). Guess I’ll use the bowl/glass replacement next time. My roommate cut himself on one of my chef knives recently …
Gordon Ramsay’s method (at least on the youtube video I just watched) showed vertical first. I’m still figuring out onions. I’m not keen on any of the methods I’ve seen so far that involve horizontal cutting at all though.
Not to mention, eventually, you’re going to have to WASH that knife. I spend way more care washing my knives than I do smooshing the garlic.
You can use a large mason jar, easier and quieter.
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