People are shooting down Walmart delivery drones

It would have been nice if the journalist cited real data. They claim "People are shooting..." and "It’s apparently quite common for Americans to shoot at drones..." and then only cite a single anecdote?

>Last week a Florida man admitted to shooting down a Walmart delivery drone, which he claimed was surveilling him

This really Is the thing that scares me about radicalization and the shocking ease with which guns can be acquired in be United States.

Folks who don’t have much to do, become converted to an ideology and are also empowered to obtain weapons capable of deadly force. And you have people shooting at things in the sky. What if this had been an airplane? Or a paraglider?

Here on Airstrip One we have airspace laws.

If we own our home, an englishmans home is his castle, we own the rights to the sky directly above.

So if a drone flies above my home I can legally shoot the poxy thing down.

Which I will do.

Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos is a popular 13th-century Latin maxim basically translating to…”whoever's is the soil, it is theirs all the way to heaven and all the way to hell.”

This phrase was used in a court case in 1587 where a landowner built a structure that blocked a portion of his neighbor's sunlight. The structure was deemed legal since the landowner owned the entire space above his land.

> The Federal Aviation Administration punishes any shots fired at drones with the same weight as if you’d opened fire on a Boeing full of passengers. Shooting at any aircraft is charged as a felony with up to 20 years in prison as the recommended penalty.

Whoa, crazy. I wonder when/how this will be updated?

The drone was 75ft (~23m) which I think is rather low. AFAIK the US has drone space up to 400ft (120m) and this probably should be flying in the upper part of that envelope. I could see why large drones flying so low would be particularly annoying. I also think there should be corridors for such drones carved out so they can fly even higher than 120m and stay even further away from people.

The standard response to this should be: "Of course they are".

I can't blame these guys to be honest.

Here in Europe we don't own guns but if they keep buzzing my house just to make mr. Wallmart even richer then I would also do something about it.

But really, I won't have to because this stuff won't get approved here anyway.

- "Shooting at any aircraft is charged as a felony with up to 20 years in prison as the recommended penalty."

This is quite wrong: 20 years is a statutory maximum [0]. These are not sentencing recommendations. They're often very distant from actual sentences [1].

[0] https://abovethelaw.com/2020/05/is-it-illegal-to-shoot-down-... ("Is It Illegal To Shoot Down A Drone?" (2020))

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240114090811/https://www.popeh... ("Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS." (2013))

Do any of these drones drop off on a balcony (either detached home, triplex or mega building?).

Could see these services becoming popular when a building has an elevator outage.

Where’s my air-dropped defibrillator at?

A single shot with a 9mm pistol hitting a drone 75' in the air? One has doubts.

Suicide drones are a thing, if you see a random drone, you can reasonably fear for your life. Thus these drones better fly high enough to not be seen as threats.

in my day, we used spears

https://youtu.be/bOnjlyZf6LE

> Winn is apparently a crack shot, because he hit the drone in center mass, and a bullet hole was found in the drone’s payload area

A true crack shot would have hit the CPU. :)