It will work exactly the same way as drug legislation will work.
A new THC molecule (FRT module) will come out that is juuuuust different enough from the other illegal stuff that it will technically be legal and available for purchase at your local gas station (gun store) for about 2 weeks, after which the laws will be amended and the process repeated.
We will soon see feats of gun engineering horror that you never thought possible in this timeline. I'm picturing Rube Goldberg tier designs sticking outside of the frame of the gun.
This isn't that far different than what has already happened surrounding the dance around making your weapons fully semi-automatic. It will simply be streamlined down to the most barebones and efficient circumvention of the law.
I think it (a hypothetical future end of the Hughes Amendment, that is) would be like Marijuana legalization but for a different reason
If we peek back at my original post that ignited this line of thinking for me we can get a vague estimate at how much revenue one single company can generate from one single product while also selling dozens more supported by some rough data
10,000 units per month means 120,000 units annually and at $250 per means a theoretical $30,000,000 in net sales annually just from ARC Fires assuming no increases in production or disruptions and no super safeties or any of the other products they sell. Why is this important? A couple reasons
What was one of the two primary incentives behind large scale legalization of marijuana besides emptying out jails and prisons? Money, for the state and those who grow and sell it. The same motives obviously applies to FRT's. People want money, so they sell FRT's, people want full auto functionality but don't want to pay even depressed due to FRT's pricing for beat to shit MAC's so they buy FRT's. If just one company can have a gross income of $30M just from 120k of one product without accounting for anything else they sell that is a clear indicator of massive demand (demand obviously correlates to proliferation and once proliferation reaches a critical point there will have to be serious debate about the Hughes amendment), incentivizing new manufacturers to pop up like mushrooms after rain (which they already are, meeting demand and thus furthering proliferation). Grabbers (which I will fully admit, I am writing much too reasonably in this scenario) are then left with a choice. FRT's are legal in 32 states (Ignore Colorado, they're only illegal in a few counties but most sellers refuse to ship their across the board), Alaska is permissive while Hawaii bans them. Sure we'll probably lose a couple of the green states between now and then but still.
Millions and millions of people so own guns live in those states. Grabbers face the following choice in a situation in which widespread FRT ownership leads for a serious movement to repeal the Hughes Amendment
A. They rail and rail against the possibility of repeal and thus unintentionally lend their support to the continued manufacture and sale of completely unregulated and unregistered devices they call machine guns (it's irrelevant that they also want FRT's banned)
Or.
B. They support the repeal of the Hughes Amendment and the subsequent reopening of the machinegun registry which depending on a few factors (such as whether or not FRT's would need to be registered under an amnesty or whether Tax stamps are adjusted for inflation) could lead to a tidal wave of new MG registrations (think of how devalued the dollar is right now and think ahead to how much further depreciated it will be in say, 10 years In order to get a feeling of just how little $200 will be by then) which could possibly have serious implications on future court cases at SCOTUS.
"But AGPinochet this is all predicated on FRT's not getting banned any time soon before proliferation can reach a critical mass".
Realistically, barring Las Vegas 2.0 the earliest that FRT's could maybe get banned would be January 21st, 2029 and that's assuming dems have control of congress and decide to nuke the filibuster, until then tens of thousands of FRT's will be sold monthly, every month, for an increasingly large range of firearms. FRT's are still a relatively obscure and niche item these days. But in a few years?. AS Designs, a single manufacturer is capable of selling 10k ARC Fires a month (this isn't even counting their conventional super safety sales) and there are dozens of manufacturers and resellers. This is before we even get into rhetorical arguments about marijuana legalization, alcohol prohibition and the Nordic model of prostitution but rewritten for guns
What I'm basically getting at is that eventually there are going to be so many FRT's being made and sold to the point where outright banning them will be very hard politically and people will start asking questions as to why they can't have real machineguns when they have the next best thing that is practically identical? And Grabbers will be forced into the extremely difficult position of either staying the course or advocating for "harm reduction" by reopening the MG registry and giving people taxed, regulated and registered machineguns
