Have you ever heard of John P. Foote? I hadn’t until recently when I researched and wrote about the Cobray Terminator shotgun. I found the man behind the gun, and a brief read fascinated me. Mr. Foote worked with men like Eugene Stoner and Gordon Ingram. He seemed to have a knack for building affordable, easy-to-make, and cheap-to-make firearms.
He was a mechanical engineer and test engineer on the SR-71 Blackbird. The first firearms he worked on were rocket-powered, but there isn’t much information about them. Small Arms Review mentions a 16mm pistol and a 40mm shoulder-fired, drum-fed magazine. He worked with Eugene Stoner on the 25mm Bushmaster gun.
Throughout his career, he designed a number of firearms, and I wanted to catalog some of his designs, at least the ones that made it further than a single prototype.
Terminator Shotgun
One of his most successful commercial designs comes from what’s easily the worst shotgun ever made. The Terminator Shotgun from Cobray is a weird one. It’s an open bolt, single shot, slamfire shotgun with some tactical flare. The short barrel and metal collapsing wire stock keep it away from the traditional sporting single-shot firearm.
The gun had intensive recoil, and the slamfire action sent the bolt flying backward, which didn’t help. It was an economical design that kinda reminded me of the Liberator pistols and later Winchester shotgun. It looks perfect to cheaply drop behind enemy lines so a partisan could retrieve a better weapon eventually. Yet, it was sold as a commercial shotgun.
M261 M16 .22LR Conversion
The Terminator might have been his most well-known commercial design, but Mr. Foote also designed a .22LR conversion kit for the M16A1. The military purchased the kit, and it became the M261. This allowed troops to train on the cheap and likely at ranges that wouldn’t allow rifle rounds.
The M261 used a drop-in bolt and built-in buffer. It’s a bit like the CMMG kit but a little less refined. This was likely the first conversion kit. The unit used special adapters to fit the magazine inside an M16A1 magazine body. These kits are highly collectible these days.
R68/FAC-70
Mr. Foote designed an assault rifle concept in 1968. The intent was to produce a 5.56 assault rifle that used STANAG magazines but to do it super cheap. It competed with the AR-180 as a cheap-to-build and simple gas-operated assault rifle. The original was the R68, which developed in the FAC-70.
Notably, the rifle was seemingly ambidextrous. A top-located charging handle was easy to reach, and the safety sat inside the trigger guard. Foote tried to sell the design of the Sterling but lost to the AR-18.
Foote-Sterling Mk.22 Pistol
Foote did end up working with Sterling to develop the Foote-Sterling Mk.22 pistol. This was a .22LR version of the Sterling submachine gun. These were semi-auto pistols that retained the look of the Sterling as well as the side feed magazine. It was roughly 3/4s of the size of an actual Sterling.
I imagine this would be an incredibly fun plinker, but only 100 were produced. They are insanely rare, and a preliminary look at the auction sites doesn’t show any coming up for sale. A design like this is ultra neat, and I would love to have one. Someone remake this!
Encom Pistol
John Foote designed the Encom Pistol for Encom America, a company also known as Enfield America, which had no connection to RSAF Enfield. The Encom pistol is a somewhat crude, TEC-9-like 9mm or .45 ACP pistol. It’s huge, with a stamped receiver and a massive magazine well.
It was a very simple blowback-operated pistol. The guns could be converted to a carbine with a screw-on barrel and attachable wire stock. It’s very simple, crude, and somewhat ugly, but 5,000 were made, and it might be Foote’s highest-production firearm.
FAS-173
The ’70s and ’80s were a weird period when full-auto, magazine-fed shotguns seemed to be the future. Between the original AA-12 and the CAWS, there was plenty to go around. Mr. Foote’s entry into the genre was the FAS-173. Like most of Foote’s guns, it was designed cheaply. It was stamped steel and super simple.
He made both 12 and 20-gauge prototypes which were based on the FAC-70 carbine. It’s gas-operated and fed from ten-round magazines. There isn’t a ton of information out there about these guns, and as a shotgun nut, its existence eluded me.
The Guns of Mr. Foote
Mr. Foote isn’t well known, but he had a penchant for designing cheap firearms. He was certainly creative and likely in the wrong era to succeed. If he was designing guns today, he might have had a bit more success, especially with a .22LR Sterling, as even an economical 5.56 rifle. Who knows what could have been? He was an outside-the-box thinker, and I appreciate his talents even if they seemed a bit odd.
