Should the Hughes Amendment be repealed? (DISCUSSION)

[u/clawzord25]

As someone who enjoys the 2nd Amendment and is an advocate for it, I found myself thinking about the implications that honest-to-god machine guns would have on public safety.

I know that's quite rich and that this concern has been brought up a lot in the past to stifle the rights of gun owners. Still, I really do worry that machine guns, particularly full-power rifle cartridge machine guns like the PKM and M240, being cheaper and more available to purchase for bad actors, could cause catastrophic damage to the public and LEOs.

Semi-automatic weapons require reloading, and there's a realistic cap on their fire rate due to that necessity. Even if someone has an FRT or Bump Stock, the gun's effective rate of fire is nowhere near its theoretical cyclic rate.

In contrast, dedicated machine guns have a higher capacity for ammunition with belts, which means they can sustain their firepower for longer. Additionally, they fire much more powerful cartridges.

7.62x54R and 7.62x51 are not intermediate by any means. They are capable of penetrating body armour and can pass through multiple human bodies with ease.

Imagine a hostage situation where LEO has to storm an entrenched PKM nest or a guy setting up an M240 and hella belts of ammunition in a kill zone like the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting.

It would be disastrous.

So I want to hear what your thoughts are on allowing machine guns to be in circulation once again. Is it worth the risk we take as a people, or should some category of weapons stay off-limits to a vast majority of the general public?

[u/entertrainer7]

Can a machine gun cause a lot more damage in public than semi auto rifles? Yes and no. How many full autos did the Vegas shooter have? You can easily make a semi auto rifle as potentially destructive as a machine gun with common, off the shelf components. Or you can use some simple parts to simulate full auto fire. Or you can just drill the third hole and actually convert your semi into a full auto. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not just a potential problem if we get rid of the Hughes amendment—it should or could be a problem today. But thankfully it’s generally not.

There will always be outliers like Vegas, and those outliers will happen with purchased machine guns if we eliminate the Hughes amendment, but we can’t restrict everyone’s rights based on the potential violation of a few bad actors. We just have to soberly analyze the risks and prepare accordingly, like by eliminating gun free zones and encouraging everyone to have the mindset of a first responder.