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Air rifles are very under-developed. US federal law has never considered them to be firearms.
Creating a fully-automatic helium-powered submachine gun that can push at least one 30-round magazine of 9mm-equivalent-or-better projectiles at lethal speeds is trivial with current materials science. The last time anyone seriously tried to make a military firearm of this nature was the late 1700s, though there are a few current manufacturers that make manually-repeating hunting rifles based on this concept.
Combining that with electronic controls (and a lack of NFA- so for this application computer-based fire control, full-auto, and integrated suppressors will obviously be standard) provides even more interesting options. Want to fire a non-lethal burst at a target before the next trigger pull fires a burst that's going fast enough to penetrate? That's impossible with a traditional firearm simply due to its nature but eminently practical with an air rifle (liability issues aside).
The only problem here is how you're going to turn that into a handgun, but cartridge-and-captive-piston storage technology might be sufficiently promising in that regard to obviate that concern as well.
My own experimentation indicates that it's possible to get:
Such a weapon would have a number of tradeoffs, but it illustrates another corner of the possibility space. It's all a question of what you're optimizing for; right now, almost all optimization is happening in a very small area of the possibility space, focused on a very narrow cluster of factors, because the gun culture has not generally been sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil and really thought about the nature of the problem for five minutes. There's low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere in terms of legal frameworks, capital-intensive manufacturing, DIY, you name it. The fruit isn't being picked because people in the gun culture, generally, aren't looking at things from the correct perspective to make that fruit visible. They're thinking in terms of incremental shifts from what the current state of things, not about desired end-states and the most efficient route to them.
Even this inefficient search method is probably enough to get us where we need to go, but if the perspective shifts, we could get there a hell of a lot faster.
[EDIT] - I want to elaborate on the subject of optimization.
The gun culture has moved from the standard longarm being a shotgun or bolt-action rifle to the AR15. That was an optimization process driven in large part by political and social conflict, and the route it optimized down was capital-heavy industrial production. One of the tradeoffs it largely accepted was conforming not only to the letter but also the spirit of state and federal firearms legislation, with the goal of getting the highest-quality firearms possible under the constraints they imposed. This has worked really, really well, with the result that we now have arrived on more or less the pinnacle of industrially-produced cartridge-firing autoloading firearms. All longarm designs converge on the AR15, and all handgun designs converge on the Glock, and both designs are well into their grind to the asymptote.
Now that we're chasing the asymptote with capital-heavy industrial production of small arms, the best value comes from expanding out into optimizing other factors. One of these is erosion of existing weapons controls by dropping adherence to the spirit of the rules; we see this with bump stocks, FRT triggers, pistol braces, suppressor paperwork streamlining, all of which are a good start. One of the obvious bits of low-hanging fruit is to do for destructive devices what's been done for SBRs, full-auto and suppressors; there's some small activity visible on this front, but clear potential for much, much more. Another piece of low-hanging fruit is what we might call the Liberator angle pioneered by Defense Distributed: focus on cutting cost and complexity of manufacturing to get the simplest, cheapest, easiest-to-produce firearm possible, and then work back toward effectiveness from there.
And in this factor, it's interesting to note how the logic of crowds flows through the possibility space, and how memetic effects determine the rate and direction of flow. DD established a paradigm of 3d-printing guns, and now the DIY space is focused on optimizing the 3D-printing paradigm, so we get the FGC-9. But while the FGC-9 is a fantastic development, you can already see how people are still thinking in terms of capital-intensive high-quality manufacturing: they're trying to reproduce a commercially-produced pistol-caliber-carbine from the low-cost DIY angle. 3d printers are still relatively expensive and relatively complicated to set up and operate, and the guns they turn out vary significantly in quality. They're working toward "effectiveness", but their definition of "effectiveness" is based on a commercially-produced cartridge firearm. It seems to me that there's more opportunity in defining effectiveness in terms of lethal effect, total input costs, ease of manufacture, and ubiquity of material. The community obviously appreciates this, with their efforts to answer questions like "what about barrels" and "what about ammo", but there's a sense in which they're committing to building a pencil, when they could in fact use clay and a stylus or, indeed, a printing press. Is the goal to have a pencil, or is it to write a text? Is it to write a text, or is it to disseminate ideas as widely as possible? To what extent does commitment to specific forms and factors get in the way, especially in a contested environment where powerful interests are to a lesser or greater degree actively hunting communications infrastructure?
And there's considerably more besides, but that's at least a start.
I remember an episode of CSI where someone mounted an ammo box’s worth of rounds to a plastic printed sheet on a wood board, connected all the rounds to electric triggers, and used these ammo-board guns to turn people into goop in a single moment. Still using existing ammo but it opened my eyes to what makes a “gun”.
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