I tried to create the most offensive possible situation that doesn’t involve a drone. Not sure where you are getting “hypothetical death threats from”.
This entire thread, which I didn’t open, is about illegally responding to a lawful activity, sanctioned by a Federal agency, with deadly force.
This is a really bad idea. Come to think of it, if you have a shotgun in hand and approach a drone operator, having just fired a weapon illegally and committed a felony…well. Live by the sword, die by the sword. If you don’t want to die by the sword, maybe you should leave it locked in a gun safe.
That guy has no justification either. What do you think you are, Batman? (Or the Punisher?) Oh, look, there’s a guy who just ripped a purse away from a woman on the sidewalk: I’m gonna kill him dead with my big effin’ gun! No? Well, then, what’s your justification for him stealing the purse?
Really bad logic.
Now, if the drone shows guns or missiles, I’m right beside you shooting at it.
How, precisely, is flying an RC controlled quad copter condoned by a Federal agency? Does the thing have an FAA issued number like on aircraft? Has it filed a flight plan? Is the operator licensed?
You guys who pulled killing the drone pilot out of your asses should shove it back up there where you got it. Nobody in the thread said anything about doing that. Nobody. All the threats are to the drone itself. I haven’t even said anything about using a gun to do that much. You guys are going right past straw man arguments and just plain making shit up.
Destroying someone’s property certainly carries some potential criminal charges depending on local laws. I approached the OP from a humorous hypothetical perspective not advocating actually shooting the things for real. I admit there’s been some more serious takes since the beginning.
That said shooting a gun in your own yard isn’t necessarily a crime in huge swathes of the US. It’s frequently perfectly legal in rural areas. I’ve literally done it with a .22lr off a rural friends porch (safe direction and appropriate backstop.)
Shooting a drone is not deadly force. Skeet shooting isn’t deadly force. The targets aren’t actually alive. They are property. The key difference is ownership of the destroyed property.
Civil liability and criminal charges for destroying a drone was over your property is an interesting legal case though. I doubt laws have caught up and what’s on the books is going to take some new interpretations. Is the drone flight path a violation and does that allow taking action to stop it? I’m pretty sure those issue didn’t cross the lawmakers minds when the law was written.
In a lot of rural areas, where you could legally shoot in the yard, I’d be surprised if someone got convicted for shooting a drone that appeared to be peeping in the house. Legality is different than social expectations for a jury of peers.
d. Helicopters. Helicopters may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph B or C of this section if the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface. In addition, each person operating a helicopter shall comply with any routes or altitudes specifically prescribed for helicopters by the Administrator.
So, by the laws of the land, operating a UAV helicopter (a quadcopter is just a variant of one) is permitted at any (safe) altitude anywhere in the nation. It might be a grey area if the drone operator doesn’t have a license for the aircraft and drone - but that’s going to be changing very shortly.
Shooting it down is a felony. It’s a grey area if it’s flying so low to be considered unsafe to your person. For example if someone flew their quadcopter over the fence 5 feet over your head to buzz your barbecue, you could probably shoot or grab the drone. But if it’s 100 feet up, above the nearby obstructions to flight, then you’re risking trouble with the Feds.
Instead of using a shotgun, get some curtains. These things are going to become a heck of a lot more common in the future.
Suppose the bumper of my car encroaches on your driveway a few feet while I am trying to turn my vehicle around safely. If you engage that car bumper with a shotgun, your argument doesn’t hold water. It’s rounds fired in my direction, and attempted murder.
If, in the course of firing shotgun pellets at a drone, if those pellets come down near any person, well.
Using a firearm for any hostile reason is pretty much raising the stakes to life or death any time you do it. That’s why you should save firearms for when your death is a real possibility and don’t use them on a whim.
I’d like to hear Mr. Drone Pervert’s explanation to the police as to why his video of mean Mr. Homeowner destroying his drone shows the man opening his bedroom window to aim his weapon at the drone. How does one explain to the cops that one was just innocently recording surreptitious video of people in their private residence? Been a while since I wore a badge, but I don’t see many LE types getting all righteously indignant on drone boy’s behalf. Skeevy voyeuristic sex offender sorts should just consider the loss of a drone now and again an unavoidable cost of their perversion. People who have some legit need to be flying one around private residences should have the common courtesy to notify the people there.
No matter how many times you try to make this about guns being pointed at people, it won’t be true. Drones aren’t living things and they don’t carry human passengers. You are completely making shit up and implying that is what people in this thread said they would do. That is not an honest debate tactic.
It seems a lot of people here are making some serious ass-somptions about cameras on quad copters.
A quick look at Amazon shows there are lots of units that aren’t equipped with cameras and lots that have detachable cameras.
So we can take away from this that not all QCs have cameras 100% of the time.
Picture if you will you shoot one down and claim to the police it was filming you. The only problem is there is no camera in the wreckage.
Turns out the reason it was at 2nd story height is you neighbor just bought it and was learning to fly it.
This will not make for good neighbor relations.
Here’s a couplelinks to legal status of sUAS/UAV’s now that thread has gone that direction (legalities, etc). FAA is being slow to respond officially, but States are moving right ahead in ‘privacy’ and LEO usage(s). California makes it a crime to spy on others, in so many words, and other States as well, IIRC from reading through them last night.
Note that the second link, mostly just ‘general advice’ is in “partnership with FAA” at this time, so it may give an indication of what is to/may come at Fed level (??).
ALso, the term ‘drone’ is becoming obscure and vague - seems that the smaller-sized ‘personal’ craft are now termed sUAS’s - small Unmanned AIrcraft Systems, IIRC. The bigger non-hovering types are more of a ‘drone’ than the much more limited in performance quad-copters are, afaik.
Or there is footage, but it’s of the house behind yours, meaning the camera was facing away from your house.
A quick googling found this random drone footage using a GoPro. It’s not that high up but as I said earlier, you can just barely make out sex &/or race. You’re just not going to capture something perverse with these cameras as they don’t have the optics for that. Take one out & you may very well find yourself on the wrong end of federal charges.
What federal charges? Filed by whom? Give one example of this ever happening. Don’t care what the outcome was. You seem to think .gov LE and prosecutors have fuck-all to occupy them professionally if you honestly believe they are going to prosecute somebody for swatting a toy helicopter.
You would think they’d have better things to do than worrying about someone taking a hacksaw to a shotgun to make it an inferior and less accurate weapon.
With a firearm? Inside city limits? Yes, the city has a lot of attorneys who have ample time to prosecute exactly this kind of thing. If they can take a kid to court for hitting another kid with a skateboard (a friend of mine was on a jury for a case like that) then you can bet they’ve got time to go after firearms crimes.
Meanwhile…give one example of someone actually shooting down a drone. Has this actually happened at all? When it does, we’ll find out how seriously Federal attorneys take it. You seem to imagine they’ll turn away from it and pretend they didn’t see it. A lot of us think otherwise.
(Try aiming a laser pointer at an aircraft. Federal charges have certainly been filed in several of those cases.)