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Seeing as it is apparent that you totally missed the point of the article: the drone was PRIVATELY-OWNED.

Jon Q. Public used his own personal stuff to do a good thing. You know; like when a gun owner exercising their rights under the Second Amendment uses a personal sidearm to put a criminal out of commission.

When’s the last time you bitched about anyone doing that?

When’s the last time you wrote anything about guns that runs anywhere near parallel with what you wrote about drones? I’m guessing the answer to that is “Never” because you believe that We, The People enjoy the Right To Keep And Bear Arms.

So, what about the right of the people to buy, build, own and operate their own unmanned aircraft? Or did you not make the connection to the radio-control community and realize that tens of thousands of people already do? Are you lying awake at night worrying about that guy down the street flying his R/C stuff over your house? I think not.

And here’s a different angle: did people raise a similar stink way back when the issue of public agency ownership of guns was on the table for discussion? Did anyone ever look at guns and argue that police shouldn’t have them, but the people should have unrestricted access? If that argument ever saw the light of day, it obviously didn’t get much traction.

But that’s the argument you’re trying to making about drones. Sorry, but looking around and seeing that armed police are the norm, it seems silly to argue that polices ought not have R/C aircraft, even more so since they already have helicopters and airplanes. We may be rightly uncomfortable with the cops continuing on and getting geared up with heavier and heavier weapons, and becoming militarized; it’s not what We, The People want. But nobody with any credibility is out there arguing to disarm them like the anti-RKBA set is saying to disarm all of us.

Similarly, we may not like the notion of public agencies having drone capability at a military level, but at lower levels of capability, UAV tech has great potential for successful, positive impact in many common situations encountered by public-sector agencies. There’s not any good reason to enable that.

And I ought to be clear with you about exactly what will happen if we don’t: they’ll get them, anyway, and make laws saying that private citizens can’t have one any larger than 10 pounds, or something ridiculous like that. You raise a stink about public agencies having drones for sensible use, and you’re going to get hit with blowback over private citizens being able to have them at all for ANY use. They can’t but you can? That dog don’t hunt.

The argument doesn’t work with guns; it doesn’t work with cars, airplanes, or helicopters; it doesn’t work with radio-controlled aircraft, either.

So, instead of going on some booga-booga scare-mongering diatribe about how public agencies might use really high-tech drones in oppressive ways; get personally involved in the public policy discussions to fight the emergence of stupid laws limiting private citizens’ unregulated access to ownership and usage of radio controlled craft. Get into the fight to keep private radio-controlled aircraft regulation from exploding into onerous and stupid limitations.

AND, maybe get busy building your own drone (A.K.A. radio-controlled aircraft), and equip it with anti-drone capability. A modest quad-copter capable of dropping a nylon mesh net onto the rotors of another craft would probably do.

Aerial “Robot Wars” anyone?