Should the Hughes Amendment be repealed?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/Lord_Elsydeon]

All the Hughes Amendment does is restrict a right to the wealthy.

You obviously DO NOT understand what a "machine gun", as defined by the NFA, is.

You are thinking of medium machine guns, which use full-powered cartridges, like 7.62x54R and 7.62x51mm NATO.

Under the NFA, a "machine gun" is any firearm that can fire multiple times per "single function of the trigger".

The Hughes Amendment does not actually ban the common man from legally owning a machine gun.

It bans the common citizen from owning a machine gun unless it was made before 19 May 1986.

Thus, we have a class of firearms that are called "Transferrable" machine guns, in that they were registered as machine guns that were lawfully in the possession of citizens before that date.

The only people who are actually fighting to keep this bad law in place are the owners of transferrable machine guns, some of them are **literally** worth their weight in gold, or more, due to rarity.