I’ve long been thinking that the next danger to face in mass shootings is not going to be the traditional gunman, but rather, something like a poor man’s AC-130: a drone with a machine gun on it, that can not only gun down a big crowd with ease, but even pursue those fleeing and keep shooting.
And then, unlike a gunman who typically gets killed by police or has to shoot himself as cops close in on him, the drone could fly elsewhere to escape capture and be used another day or self-destruct or go drown itself in a lake or something.
I think if it were easy to mount a machine gun on a drone, and then actually use it, we’d have seen it in Ukraine by now. For mass casualties, it would be much easier to just use a claymore landmine, or the home made equivalent.
There’s plenty of places to launch from - We saw how quickly cops shut down the Key Bridge to traffic last week. Two guys could do that on a straight rural road easily enough. There’s also enough GA airports that I could easily get onto the runway just by walking or driving.
Ukraine isn’t after weapons of terror. They don’t need to scare a large civilian populace, they need to hobble an actual military force in the field. The challenge in a military engagement is accurate fire so your rounds actually incur casualties among an enemy formation that’s spread out and trained to seek cover (and shoot back at your drone). Not only would you be trying to carry a heavy weapon and a lot of rounds, but you’d need a good way to aim it independently of the drone’s orientation. That’s a pretty tall order.
OTOH, for a terrorist looking to cause indiscriminate mayhem in a civilian populace, the job is easier. Instead of a machine gun, imagine a drone fitted with a semiautomatic handgun. Small, easy for a modestly sized drone to carry. Only a dozen rounds onboard, and it only shoots in the direction the drone is pointed. Fly half a dozen of these into an open-air stadium where a football game is taking place, and start shooting randomly into the crowd. It’s wall-to-wall people in there, so even though the terrorist can’t aim with much accuracy, most of the rounds will hit people. But the shooting will cause far more casualties when the panicked attendees start trampling over each other as they all try to get to the exits at the same time.
Flamethrowers are another weapon ideally suited for targeting crowds.
You do not need to launch drones from roads or runways.
Here’s a list of commercial drones from one company:
For your well-heeled terrorists or obnoxious nation-states, these are cheap:
Takes off vertically, has a range of 370km, and can carry a 5kg payload. 5KG would be enough to drop 10-20 grenades on people, or one really big high explosive blast.
For your terrorist on a budget, one of these would work, with a 1 kg payload. $300-$400
Again, no runway needed. Launch it by throwing it in the air. 100 km would be an easy enough range for that thing, or less with a bomb attached. But how much range do you really need in America? Even from the outskirts o a city 20km would get you just about anywhere you wanted to go.
Drones are a threat to any country. The Russian/Ukraine war has shown how deadly they can be in attacks.
We’re also seeing ways to jam or redirect the signal to drones. I’ve read the Russians can quickly track and strike the origin of a launched drone within minutes. Drone operators have to keep moving.
Terrorists will eventually use them in attacks. The genie is out of the bottle.
Their range is a serious threat to the US. Attacks from outside our borders could strike our heartlands.
Canadians evidently have more entertaining hobbies than folks in NJ. Plenty of US rednecks use dynamite for fishing or entertainment, so it has to be easy enough to buy somewhere in ruralia.
Or, you know, some Bad Guy finds a discarded nuclear medicine device in a junkyard and uses that for a dirty bomb. It’s very disturbing how many people have been killed accidentally by improperly discarded medical devices over the years.
There are thousands of GA airplanes being built in garages all over the US right now. Replace the controls with cheap RC servos and the pilot with a cheap computer and GPS. Take off on any half mile of straight road and fly to a target hundreds of miles away to explode a 200lb pipe bomb in the pilots seat. Very easy to do, not really all that expensive.
Explosives are easy to make. Incindieries are even easier. The equivalent of a Molotov cocktail dropped from a drone can do plenty of damage in the right place. Remember, this is to instill terror, not take out hard targets.
Do any of you remember the movie/book “Black Sunday”? It was about a terror attack in the U.S. The perps planned to use a blimp to drop a device that was just a sphere with thousands of holes in it, with a bullet in each one. In the middle was a simple charge that when detonated pushed pins into all the primers in the bullets, firing all of them at once into the crowd. Ingenious, and actually feasible.
Drones enable whole new categories of ways to spread terror.
Are terrorists uniquely bad at flying drones? If it’s so easy to cause so much havoc with drones, why haven’t we seen it anywhere in the US, Europe, Canada, China, etc.?
I feel a bit like I did just after 9/11. I kind of expected a major follow-up wave of attacks intended to keep destabilizing the US and its allies.
When that never materialized, I figured that this meant there were actually very few terrorists out there with both the will and ability to make it to the US to carry out such an attack. As we say above, it’s really quite easy in our society - hell, the US sees crazy people committing mass shootings every week. That they are not so common suggests there aren’t that many terrorists committed to attacking the US directly.
How long have drones been easily available? They used to be a niche for tech geeks.
Photographers have been using drones for years. Paparazzi over Hollywood swimming pools, for example. And technical aerial photography, (example: surveying farmers’ fields for spots needing extra fertilizer.)
But I think it’s only since the war in Ukraine that the general public has had knowledge of drone usage, including articles explaining how easy it is. So it’s only been about 12 months. Maybe the bad guys are just now starting to pay attention and get organized.
Once somebody puts the idea into actual use and makes headlines ("Drone Purchased at Toys R Us Kills Ten!!!), the dam will break open. And then I think we’re going to be in for a massive amount of drone attacks, all over the world. Everything from silly pranks that go bad and kill someone by accident…to major terrorist attacks.
There’s a big difference in damage potential between the cheap quadcopters that can carry ounces of payload, the model airplanes that can carry a pound, the mongo model airplanes that can carry 10 lbs, and the genuine people-carrying very light planes that can carry a couple hundred pounds.
To be sure, the first time some idjit with a quadcopter toy drone drops e.g. 8 ounces of lit firecrackers into the crowd at a county fair someplace there will be lots of handwringing about copycats and slippery slopes and all the rest.
Very few (sensible) people avoid all crowds because they know that crowds attract mass shootings (at least in the USA) and they fear being a victim. Most of us enter crowds without the slightest thought of becoming involved in an active shooter event while we’re there.
Will this eventually become just one more hazard of modern life? Probably. But like our current attitude to COVID, not long after it happens a few times it’ll be just one more thing out there.
