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Question Should the Hughes Amendment be repealed?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?
18
u/IDrinkMyBreakfast Jul 19 '25
Sorry for the book. There’s a lot to cover here.
To begin, I believe you’re operating under several false premises.
Under our closed system, an M240 can be had for a bit over half million dollars. Even if you repealed the Hughes Amendment and flooded the market with M240’s, they ain’t gonna be cheap. The average cost to the military is around $6600 per system. Commercial will be at least double that (I use the GSA system and prices are great by comparison).
So it’s still going to be an expensive purchase, much like a Barrett M107, and likely more.
Next, believe it or not, belt-fed semi auto is a thing. Even if it weren’t, it’d still only take a couple seconds to reload a magazine. I was an M60 machine gunner in the Navy. My belt-fed system was convenient, but I’d have gotten by with 20 round magazines just fine (like the BAR used in WWII).
The Vegas shooting was terrible. This guy used TTP’s I haven’t seen since a Hollywood movie based on colonial times.
He brought multiple weapons. Once he finished with one, he moved onto the next. A machine gun would’ve made little difference in this case. In fact, If he had a machine gun, he likely would’ve killed fewer people. He used scoped weapons, so it seems that he chose his specific targets instead of spraying and praying.
Hear me out. Machine guns are suppression weapons. You don’t carefully aim, you put multiple rounds downrange to get your enemy to duck, while your team conducts a flanking maneuver to eradicate them. It’s not like the movies where you point the barrel in their general direction and everybody dies. On a different movie-related note, silencers don’t make guns silent either.
Simply shooting a machine gun into a crowd is no better than this. You’ll hit people, but nowhere near as many than by carefully aiming. This Vegas guy is shooting at night. If he were to use a machine gun, he’d need tracer fire to better direct rounds on his targets. Otherwise, he’s not seeing where is rounds are going.
Next, I can’t speak to the 7.62x54, but believe it to be comparable to the 7.62x51.
The 7.62x51 is possibly the most popular 30 cal round in the US. I have a SCAR-17 and a NEMO Tango 8 in that caliber. I don’t need full auto to do damage with these weapons. That would be a waste of ammo. If the Vegas shooter had used 7.62x51, the round may well have done as much or more damage when carefully aimed. It’s designed to have greater energy at distance and is the standard caliber my team carried in the 80’s
In a hostage situation with a 7.62 machine gun, LEO is going to do the same thing they’d do in any armed hostage situation. Negotiate, tear gas, close in through flanking maneuvers and neutralize the shooter.
What’s different is that the press will have a field day spreading misinformation because they know most people only know what they see in movies about guns.
Machine guns are already out there. Just Google machine guns Chicago to see how criminals have modified pistols to full-auto.
What’s being done? Well, when these folks are caught, they get ror’d and in some cases are re-offending for the same crimes before their next hearing.
Doing away with the Hughes Amendment will allow law abiding citizens legal access to full auto weapons. Do you know what they’ll do with them? They’ll have a great time wasting ammo at the local range. That’s it
What they won’t do is blindly shoot up their neighborhood like the idiots in the linked video above
That’s all I have to say about that