Right now, an inventor who makes a new automatic weapon, or just an improvement of one, must get a military or police contract or go broke.
If there was no hughes ammendment, the inventor could make a living selling the product to collectors, until he or she developed it enough to sell to the US military.
That is true, and is also true for many weapon platforms in calibers above .50 inches in diameter.
It is the civilian market that supplies most military technology, and it is the civilian market that gives the tools necessary to retain the position as the most powerful technologically advanced military force.
The current situation as it is means that a company must often focus on civilian legal technology as a smaller or emerging company.
The risk of spending many millions of dollars developing something that is only suitable for the military or LEO market only to receive no contracts is huge.
It means virtually all of that money goes down the drain. Which can easily ruin a smaller or even moderate size company.
But if companies can sell moderate amounts of a product to civilian customers they can continue to develop new and innovative products, and the military can actually select what it wants from far more numerous products on the civilian market to find what suites various needs. Like it does with most technology.
This helps keep it advanced and ahead of the world. Greatly reducing the time between new innovations, and the tax payer dollars necessary in the development process.
The current situation is that just a limited number of large defense contractors are in a position to even risk developing new weapon technology for our military.
This means development for certain products is much slower, dependent on what those few can come up with, and with far less competition.
This means it takes many more years before modern technology is adapted to weapons systems. And inventions and improvements are years and sometimes decades behind.
Even the licensing system limits technological development. If someone or a company in another unrelated field wishes to dabble in applying their technology to firearms they cannot. They must know they want to work with firearms and go through a process that typically ends the desire of a company which is unsure what the result would be. You don't have engineers in various numerous divisions of companies all across the country making breakthroughs as they relate to firearms like they do with other technology.
This means many technological breakthroughs with firearms don't occur anywhere nearly as often, and firearm technology is kept separate from other technology until someone already in the firearm business learns about other technology and decides to try and adapt it to firearms.
