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Question Should the Hughes Amendment be repealed?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/xracer1 Jul 19 '25

Criminals don't care about the law. If they can figure out who will sell them the weapon without filling ot the proper paperwork, assuming they are prohibited possessors and If they can afford to buy an M249, M240, PKM that are semi autos. They will convert them over to auto and probably have already done so.

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u/clawzord25 Jul 19 '25

The "Don't care about the law" argument is valid but the point I'm trying to get at with the post was that if both the NFA and Hughes were repealed, heavier weaponry would become much more accessible to the general public from the reductions in price and removal of the requirement of being an FFL or getting a tax stamp.