Hands on With the Gripknife

The Gripknife booth was easy to find at SHOT. If the stark red-on-black décor didn’t draw your eye, the life-sized machine gun toting, Gripknife-clenching Incredible Hulk figure probably would.

If you were somehow blind to those indicators, the crowd in front of the booth was three people deep and impossible to miss. In case you hadn’t heard about the Gripknife, it’s a spring-loaded knife concealed in a rail-mounted vertical foregrip.

The booth staff was explaining to the crowd the situations where their product might come in handy. One example given was that of a patrol officer suddenly tangled up with a bad guy trying to wrestle his carbine away. The Gripknife, it was asserted, would allow him to stab the guy off his gun and open distance again.

Another possible case, this time for the private citizen, was in the event of a home invasion by multiple intruders. Suppose, he asked, that the homeowner grabbed his trusty AR carbine and, focused in on one invader, didn’t notice his partner until the guy bum-rushed him and started fighting him for the gun? The Gripknife was offered as a solution to this problem as well.

Whatever one’s opinions on its utility, it seems to be well made and cleverly engineered. For instance, the button that releases the grip and auto-deploys the blade is mounted on the “sheath” part that attaches to the gun. Since it’s not on the knife part of the assembly, it neatly skirts switchblade laws.

The Gripknife isn’t cheaply built, and it’s priced accordingly. The full-size version sports an MSRP of $490, while the stubby-gripped variant is a hundred dollars less expensive.