The fact of the matter is that the US is also developing these systems, albeit with more focus on autonomous air combat vehicles. To say that this is a Russia-only problem vastly understates how serious of an issue this is.
"Known informally inside the corridors of the Pentagon as 'the Terminator conundrum,' the question being asked is whether stifling the development of these types of weapons would actually allow other less ethically minded countries to leap ahead?"
As a not American, I feel totally safe when it's the ethically minded USA who does it.
Yep. That was sarcasm, sorry.
Now the question is, "given that everybody from Putin, to terrorists, Maduro, and North Korea have these weapons, do you want the US government facing them without such weapons ?"
In an arms race, you can perhaps refuse to pull ahead (even that is risky), but nothing good will come of falling behind.
Furthermore, there can also be no doubt that the US would use such weapons to maintain it's own and it's allies' security. There can be no doubt that we'd fire such weapons at Russian armies attempting to invade the Ukranian parliament for example. More controversially, there can be no doubt that we'd fire them at not really civilian Palestinians if Israel's army loses control.
I don't think an autonomous Kalashnikov can overwhelm a squadron of drones, which aren't the most powerful thing in the US arsenal either.
> There can be no doubt that we'd fire such weapons at Russian armies attempting to invade the Ukranian parliament for example.
Haha well, they'll have to keep invading and leave just the parliament alone then.
There also exist many AR-15-pattern rifles in the civilian market - obviously without the full-auto and burst-fire modes one finds in military models, but otherwise quite similar. They're generally satisfactory firearms - cheap to feed, not unpleasant to use or overly difficult to maintain.
They're also a longstanding bête noire of the anti-guns crowd, among whom the type is infamous because people have used them in a few mass shootings, and also because if you're afraid of firearms already then this type looks super extra scary - dressed in full tacticool ribs and Picatinny, it looks like something a Terminator might carry, and they're usually finished in black.
See I thought that was the M-16; I could even have told you "the civilian version is the AR-15 and doesn't have full auto" but I'd never heard it called an M4 before. (Speaking as someone from a non-gun country whose only exposure to any of this is popular culture).
There's a category for cheap, small-caliber pistols, "Saturday night special".
That gives it a worse reputation than most other rifles.