Bid higher! If you are unloading most of your bullets you taking a chance on finishing off your opponent, with a good chance of doing so. If you fail, you are at a disadvantage as you are now low on ammo, have to change clips, etc.
The real question to me would be how to simulate spraying bullets all over an area, not in hopes of doing massive damage but in hopes that something hits. Or maybe that isn't a problem, because HW is a dramatic system, and in all the gunfights I've seen on TV or movies I've only ever seen this tactic hit someone once or twice! Usually it seems to that the hero has an uncanny ability to run along just in front of the tracking fire until he/she gets into cover.
Maybe what you are looking for is some special cludge that allows limited exchange of target number for AP bid and/or edge. So you can lower your chance to succeed by chain firing right at the target (not the most accurate), but gain a really big edge (if you succeed, you probably hit multiple times). Conversely, if you use a broad spread perhaps you can get a little higher chance to succeed, but you won't get the guns normal high edge (you aren't targetting, so if you hit at all it will probably just nick the target). (Multiple defender penalties already deal with the situation of spraying fire at multiple targets.)
As a first pass, you can convert 1 point on your target number to 2 points of edge, but you can't change your edge by more than your AP bid. This lets the machine gun expert do funky things like managing to disable an armored vehicle ("I bid 20 AP, and exchange have a mastery of TN for +20 edge!"). It also lets low skill people with high power guns be dangerous ("You hear laughter, and turn to see the villains more decorative-than-useful girlfriend behind the M-50. "If you don't let him go, I'll shoot all of you, even him.")
Although for the most part this adds a layer of math, and opens the potential for nasty mini-maxing, it seems like it should be a flexible general way of dealing with the issue.
(note that there is no good reason why you have to limit this to automatic weapons. You could argue it even for regular HW, but it doesn't add all that much to the existing bid system, and probably isn't worth the extra arithmetic and abuse issues.)
--Bryan
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