The Drone Menace, Redux

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

OK, this whole drone thing is getting out of hand.

You may recall that, back during the U.S. Open, I wrote with some amusement about the Pinehurst Village Council’s attempts to ban drones from the event. Seems they might have been more prescient than I thought. A recent spate of news stories makes one think that drones are moving from the category of “expensive toy for people with more money than sense” to the category of “menace.”

Take, for example, an item from fire-ravaged Southern California. According to NBC Los Angeles, the efforts of firefighters battling the so-called “North Fire” were hampered when planes deployed to dump water and chemicals on it were forced away from the blaze by no fewer than five drones of unknown origin hovering in the area (no doubt to take pictures or videos).

“This is serious,” said John Miller of the U.S. Forest Service. “[Aircraft] can strike one of these things and one of our aircraft could go down, killing the firefighters in the air.” One fire captain said the drone-caused delay “definitely contributed” to the fire’s jumping of the 15 Freeway.

On a less catastrophic but still disturbing note, there’s the story of William Merideth, from Hillview, Kentucky. Merideth apparently took exception to someone flying a drone over his property (and, according to some accounts, ogling his teenage daughter sunning herself on the deck).

“When he came down with a video camera right over my back deck, that’s not going to work,” Merideth said. To illustrate just how much that wasn’t going to work, he blasted the little buzzing nuisance out of the sky with his shotgun. A few minutes later, according to Merideth, a carful of angry men pulled up, with one demanding if he was “the [bad word] who shot my drone.” In traditional Kentucky fashion, Merideth met the group with his Glock on his hip, declaring, “If you cross that sidewalk onto my property, there’s going to be another shooting.”

Unfortunately, Merideth ended up being the one arrested, charged with “criminal mischief” and “wanton endangerment.” He’s vowed to fight the charges in court. “What other recourse do we have?” he asks.

This is one of those areas in which the law simply hasn’t kept up with issues raised by modern technology. We’ve never really had to deal, for example, with the question of just how high up your property line goes. No one would seriously claim an airliner flying at 10,000 feet over your house is trespassing. But what about a drone hovering over your yard at 50 feet, snapping pictures? Exactly how much force are you allowed to use to keep some jackass from annoying, harassing, or otherwise being a jerk with his new $1,500 quad copter?

Not much, it appears, since the National Transportation Safety Board recently ruled that even private drones are considered aircraft, and therefore subject to FAA regulation. As you might imagine, shooting down an aircraft is a pretty serious crime, with penalties of up to 20 years in prison, and the law doesn’t currently seem to make any distinction if said “aircraft” is some dude-bro’s expensive toy.

No one’s been prosecuted yet under federal law for dronecide, and an FAA spokesman has opined that that would be more of a “destruction of personal property issue and out of our jurisdiction.” However, we are talking about a federal bureaucracy here, so anything’s possible, especially if it’s stupid. Meanwhile, the California legislature is trying to catch up; they’re considering a bill to allow firefighters to “disable” drones that are getting in their way.

In light of the Drone Menace, a variety of companies have jumped in to answer Mr. Merideth’s question, “What recourse do we have?” Idaho’s Snake River Shooting Products has begun marketing a special “Drone Munition” shotgun shell. “Prepare for the Drone Apocalypse!” their advertising blares, alongside pictures of threatening drones hovering nearby with glowing red “eyes.”

A company called Droneshield can sell you a “net gun” to snag drones out of the sky. If you really want to go whole hog, the German company MBDA has tested a “laser effector to acquire, track and defeat a free-flying mini-drone.” It’ll probably only set you back a few million. It should be noted, however, that the FAA also frowns on you turning a flying object into a couple hundred pounds of flaming wreckage over populated areas.

As few as five years ago, if you’d told me that clueless goobers flying hopped-up toy helicopters controlled by their cellphones would even be a thing, let alone a societal problem, I’d have laughed in your face. But these are the times we live in. What next?

A Modest Proposal To Combat the Drone Menace at the U.S. Open

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

I confess, I was amused at first when I read in this paper that the Village of Pinehurst had banned the use of drones during the U.S. Opens.

“Really?” I thought. “Is some paranoid conspiracy theorist worried that President Obama is going to begin the final assault on our freedoms, start the imposition of Sharia law, and of course, distract everyone’s attention from Benghazi, by blowing up Phil Mickelson with a Hellfire missile?”

Hey, I’ve heard weirder theories propounded around here with a presumably straight face. You should read my email sometime. In any case, I thought, are drones such a problem that it requires the hand of the mighty Pinehurst Village Council be raised to stop them?

Well, maybe. A quick Google search using the terms “drones” and “golf course” reveals a lot of excitement about the idea of using commercially available drones to cruise over golf courses with high definition cameras, enjoying the scenery and watching the golf. Apparently, radio-controlled aircraft technology has advanced far beyond the balsa wood model Spitfire a buddy of mine spent months building, only to crash into a tree on its first flight.

“You can buy a consumer drone outfitted with four battery-powered motors and a gyro-stabilized video camera for about $1,000,” an article in Golf Digest notes, “and control it on your smartphone or tablet with a GPS-based system that was once available only to the military.”

You can imagine the problems that a swarm of the little buggers might cause as they hover and swoop over the course, buzzing like giant bees, controlled by some dude who figures he can catch the action of the Opens without leaving the house.

So, OK, the villagers have a legitimate concern. But it seems to me that while we can legislate against the newest scourge from the skies, we’re woefully unprepared to enforce such a ban, unless the Pinehurst PD has developed a previously unheard-of anti-aircraft capability.

And that’s when it hit me. We need to turn to the Open Carry movement.

In case you’re not familiar, the Open Carry movement is a group of particularly adamant firearms aficionados who believe that the defense of our Second Amendment freedoms requires them to aggressively assert their right to carry any gun, anywhere, at any time. To that end, one such group in San Antonio tends to show up in public places such as restaurants, in groups, carrying as many shootin’ irons as a platoon of Taliban insurgents.

For some inexplicable reason, the average citizen reacts with something less than joy at seeing a troop of bearded guys in camo walking into the local Chipotle armed to the teeth. Therefore, that restaurant recently joined other such chains, such as Chili’s and Sonic, in asking patrons to leave the guns at home.

“We are respectfully asking that customers not bring guns into our restaurants, unless they are authorized law enforcement personnel,” they said in a public statement.

Amazingly, the NRA joined in, in a public statement asking the Open Carry folks to cool it. The statement on the NRA’s Facebook page described the behavior of the Open Carry folks in San Antonio as not only “counterproductive” but “downright weird.”

Let me tell you, folks. The NRA telling you you’re getting a little too weird with your guns is sort of like Keith Richards coming to you and going, “’Ey, mate, y’might want to take it easier on the whiskey an’ drugs.” In response, some Open Carry advocates threatened to burn their NRA membership cards, since the organization had become soft on the Second Amendment.

It’s clear that the OC folks need some love. They need to get some of their mojo back. And we here in the Sandhills need something to counter the Drone Menace. We’ve got a need, they have more than enough guns to fill it. So I propose that the U.S. Open Committee invite the members of the San Antonio Open Carry group and other like-minded firearms advocates to the Opens.

Let them walk up and down, among the crowds, openly showing off their heaviest assault weapons, and letting the world know that the only way to stop a bad guy with a drone is a good guy with a gun.

You just know visitors who come here from all over the world will all feel that much safer knowing that the Second Amendment is being safeguarded, and any pesky drone that buzzes our way will be quickly and efficiently blasted out of the sky by a volley of high-powered ammo.

U.S. Open Carry. We need to make this happen, people. Freedom demands it.

[UPDATE: The NRA has recently backed down from its criticism of "Open Carry" and disowned its previous statement, saying "Wow, we almost made sense for a moment there. What the hell were we thinking?" Actually, what they said was that "an alert went out that referred to this type of behavior as 'weird' or somehow not normal, and that was a mistake. It shouldn't have happened." So everything's back to normal at the NRA, and by "normal" we mean "batshit crazy as usual." ]