r/gunpolitics • u/clawzord25 • Jul 19 '25

Question Should the Hughes Amendment be repealed? (DISCUSSION)

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?

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u/clawzord25 Jul 19 '25

This makes sense as an argument

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u/Bright_Crazy1015 Jul 19 '25

It's a little past that concept of self regulation, honestly, for anyone who has had to hand over a gun in a DGU. It's a hard no. Almost better to go slug it out with a handgun than to give up a nice transferable, lol.

I lost an HK FP6 shotgun to one, and a Sig P229 to another. I got the Sig back 14 months later. The FP6 was "lost" somehow. (Our town's acting chief of police was later fired for selling sh!t out of the evidence locker, but of course, no criminal charges. Just fired. They did stroke me a check for twice the value of the shotgun, $1200, but it wasn't available on the market at that point in time.)

If that was a machine gun, like an MP5, UMP, or M16, or even an M3 or Uzi, I'd have been sick. Forget a SAW or M240B. If it were a nice belt fed that costs as much as my truck or even as much as my house, I'd have puked on my boots.

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u/HelsinkiTorpedo Jul 19 '25

To be fair, if Hughes were repealed full autos would be exponentially cheaper. Honestly, most would cost about what their semi-auto variants cost today. SAWs and 240Bs would likely still command a premium, especially since they're niche enough that the demand wouldn't be high enough to justify a high supply.

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u/IDrinkMyBreakfast Jul 19 '25

Exponentially is true. Cheap is relative. The M240 currently costs the US government around $6600 each. Bringing this off the GSA market would sell for at least double.

Doable, but not cheap. Under the current market, I believe I saw an M240B for over $509k

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u/HelsinkiTorpedo Jul 19 '25

Yeah, that's why I mentioned that actual machine guns like the 240B would still be pretty expensive. My "exponentially cheaper" comment was specific to more typical firearms like ARs, AKs, etc.

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u/IDrinkMyBreakfast Jul 19 '25

Got it. I used to complain that a full auto mini Uzi was $7k. God I wish I bought one then!

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u/HelsinkiTorpedo Jul 19 '25

Right? I was born in '91, kind of mad that none of my parents or grandparents bought machine guns before the Hughes amendment