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Police Not Issuing Charges For Handgun-Firing Drone -- Feds Undecided
Mr.Intel sends a followup to last week's news of an 18-year-old man getting a lot of attention for posting a video of a handgun being fired from a drone. Despite calls to arrest the man, police say they can't find any reason to charge him. "It appears to be a case of technology surpassing current legislation," they said. Todd Lawrie, the chief of police where it happened, said, "We are attempting to determine if any laws have been violated at this point. It would seem to the average person, there should be something prohibiting a person from attaching a weapon to a drone. At this point, we can't find anything that's been violated. The legislature in Connecticut (recently) addressed a number of questions with drones, mostly around how law enforcement was going to use drones. It is a gray area, and it's caught the legislature flatfooted." The FAA and other federal agencies are still investigating and trying to figure out if any criminal statutes were violated.
Remember, your autonomous roving drone with a Beretta and solenoid is not an automatic weapon unless you code the trigger as a do/while loop!
Unroll the loop, so it counts as ten individual fire events that just happen to trigger really really fast ;P
The gun is legal but his use of the solenoid to depress the trigger may not have been. It may have transformed the "legal handgun" to simply being one component of an NFA automatic-weapon.
So what you are saying... is that when I build my own weaponized drone, I should arm it with a flamethrower instead of a hand gun?
Good to know...
Well sure. But it seems like "It was Tuesday" is generally a valid excuse for the police. Along with "It wasn't Tuesday".
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.