The Gun Counter

Well, it was only a matter of time before this happened.

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/ ... er-n447156

Who knew my RC helicopter would become illegal contraband?

I'm shocked! Shocked, I say, to hear that Leviathan has come up with a self-greasing axel solution that allows them to expand their reach and come up with new ways to dictate life to the subjects.

Listening to the whiny bastards at LAPD Aero Division BMW (bitch moan & whine) on national news the other day about the "unique threat to their life and limb" that drones create while the po-po's ghetto birds are buzzing over the serfs at 200' to catch the SOBs they should have rounded up on one of their last 42 arrests, and hearing how small, nimble, and hard to see drones are, you'd have thought that nowhere in flight school did anyone ever explain to them the relative size and speed of...wait for it...BIRDS, which have so far claimed the lives of, waitaminute...not one single fucking LAPD officer or helicopter in 50+ years of helicopter operations, despite the fact that most of the city sits alongside a body of water called the Pacific Ocean, with 14M motherfucking [strike]rats with wings[/strike] seagulls aloft near non-stop over the entire metropolis, and LAPD operating a fleet of nearly 40 helos non-stop for the last two decades.

This pile of horseshit is about .000001% actual hazard, and 99.999999% "let's stick our nose in and do an 800# gorilla bellyflop, because of the 3 documented incidents out of 42M where something almost actually happened."

In other words, federal government doing what it does best: fuck with people because they can.
And create an entire criminal class for what is overwhelmingly a non-event.

And somedude that wants to use a drone to do an illegal thing will either:

a) Buy one and not register it

or

b) build his own with parts available at any hobby store \

or

c) steal a registered one (Hmm. People don't ever do that with cars, do they?)

And then he'll do illegal things with it.

I'll just leave this link here:

http://www.dx.com/c/hobbies-toys-899/rc ... opters-840

Sideways. Rusty. Chainsaw.

I'd imagine the actual risk profile of blasting these things out of the sky (within places like the White House No Fly Zone, etc) with rock-salt loaded shotgun rounds would be small enough you could get it down to a company-grade CRM sign-off. Do that a couple of times and the retards who think it's a great idea to fly them in restricted airspace will get the hint. Considering I can build one of these damn things with parts and control code sourced over the internet means this is as about as fucktarded a plan as I've seen come out of the .gov in some time.

If something can survive a 100-foot drop, do you think rock salt will do anything to it?

Define survive. I'm not saying it needs to blown to tiny unusable bits, just knocked out of the sky to then be retrieved. Of course, as has already been mentioned, the large majority of these things are completely harmless. Of course there's always this thing as an option.

I figured, and you're not gonna be able to pull that off with rock salt. Depending on the model, I'd say even birdshot is a dubious prospect. The body might be foam, but the actual load-bearing parts and other components are metal and pretty strong plastic, even on a fairly cheap one like a Parrot AR. Gouging the body does nothing; you either have to unbalance it to the point the drone thinks it's in a crash and automatically shuts off (it has to be low enough for you to throw water bottles at it for this to work), or cause enough damage to something important that causes it to depart controlled flight.

It's harder to shoot planes down than most people think, little robot ones included.

Also, since the Parrot AR runs on wifi freqs (you actually control it by connecting your phone to it the same way you would to a wireless router) the DroneDefender probably wouldn't work on it without some rejiggering.

3.5", #4 buck covers a range of aerial [strike]targets[/strike] opportunities effectively. Just sayin'....