We’ve covered Flux Defense before, the Utah upstart that made a spring-loaded Glock brace that snicked out like a switchblade. Even if you didn’t like it, you still liked it because it just oozed cool. They followed that up with their take on an American-made B&T USW, the MP17 (See CONCEALMENT Issue 16 for a full review). This is Flux Defense’s MP17 MkII, aka the Raider. As the name implies, it’s meant to be light, fast, and quick into action.
A quick glance reveals no obvious differences between the original Flux Defense MP17 and the Raider, but of course and as usual, the devil is in the details. A closer look at the surface texture of the original MP17 betrays the fact they were 3D printed — which by itself is perfectly fine. We’ve seen 3D printers produce everything from AR lowers to enhanced controls and even silencers. That said, the Raider is injection-molded plastic and of sufficient quality as to not split apart in layers like so much PLA.
The manufacturing method itself is worthy of a new line, but we’ll be covering other changes as we come across them and there are some major ones.
BIDEN BLUES
Before we dive further, we have to talk about braces themselves. At the time of this writing, President Biden just gave his first speech about his desire to restrict the use of so-called “pistol braces.” Between now and when you read these words there may undoubtedly be changes. We covered the previous internal memos used to determine intent in CONCEALMENT Issue 19, but the short story is this: We rolled with a chassis that was already registered as
