La France M16K

The La France M16K is a compact, select-fire derivative of the M16 built by La France Specialties, a small American company that shortened service rifles for buyers who needed something smaller than a full-length carbine. Produced from 1982 to 2004, it was pitched as a replacement for the pistol carried by vehicle and helicopter crews, not as a rifle for the open field.

The M16K starts from an early Colt AR-15 upper and a standard M16 select-fire lower, cut down to an 8.125-inch barrel. With its stock extended the carbine is about 13.5 inches shorter overall than the M16 and 6.5 inches shorter than the M4. Removing that much barrel from a direct-impingement gas system normally wrecks its timing, so La France fitted a stainless twin-tube gas system with an expansion chamber ahead of the carrier, adjustable to keep the action cycling reliably over the shorter dwell time. A vortex-pattern flash hider and a molybdenum-disulphide dry-film treatment on the receiver’s internals round out the changes. Early guns carried the original AR-15 upper without a forward assist or shell deflector, and their rear sight was a metal tube welded onto the carry handle in place of the adjustable aperture, giving a short, quasi-ghost-ring sight radius; later production switched to a standard M16-pattern sight post, rounded handguards and an accessory rail.

La France marketed the carbine to vehicle and helicopter crews, and its own sales literature described it as an alternative to the submachine gun for armored-vehicle crewmen and an entry weapon for police tactical teams — the company’s own claims rather than a documented service record, since no major military or police buyer has been identified. A .45 ACP version, the M16K-45, fed from Thompson submachine-gun magazines and used a simple blowback action instead of the 5.56 mm gun’s gas system; the mechanism and chambering both change enough that it is treated as a separate design rather than a variant of this entry. SureFire acquired La France Specialties in 2004.

Sources disagree on the cyclic rate: an uncited Wikipedia figure puts it at 650 rounds per minute, while a second account says the adjustable gas system keeps it below 600, so no number is recorded here. No photograph of the M16K turned up on Wikimedia Commons, the Smithsonian’s open collections or DVIDS, which is unsurprising for a low-production carbine sold mostly outside the US military supply chain. The 5.56 mm chambering’s magazine capacity is recorded as an estimate rather than a verified figure, since the clearest source gives both capacities used across the M16K line without separating them by chambering, and no founding year is published for La France Specialties itself.