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What Happens After the First Drone Assassination?
We have seen a great many videos of drones dropping bombs on Russians and vehicles. It is now clearly obvious that the technology to murder people in this way is at hand, and trivially available. Yet, to my knowledge, it has not been done (yet) in the US.
Who would kill in this way? Gangs may not be the obvious choice: they kill to send a message, and the mano-a-mano nature of gang posturing may call for shooting at close range. So I am not sure who would do it. Surely some of these nut jobs might. And around the world… it seems like a pretty viable way to kill one’s enemies, especially the kinds of enemies that make speeches outside.
When they do, what happens next? Will governments treat overflight of drones as potential attacks? Will drones that can carry a grenade-sized payload be banned or tightly regulated? Is such a thing even possible? Will anti-drone tech become sophisticated enough to blast drones out of the sky? And how will they know the difference between a killer drone and a Walmart delivery?
I think this hypothetical will become very real in the years to come. Change my mind!
Published in General
It was predicted a long time ago. (Search for: Duck; quick!)
Drug cartels might do it. I think drones might be better used for close-range photography, so the target can be pinpointed for those on the ground. But I wouldn’t put it past a certain ex-president’s enemies, if they thought they could get away with it. They have the tech talent and the money.
This photo below is from 2015. It’s a radiofrequency rifle(ish) device. I haven’t heard about it since then and the video is blocked as private, so I suppose it’s been purchased by the government.
And this page — https://www.perfectjammer.com/drone-signal-jammers.html — is full of handheld or backpack non-directed jammers to shoulder-fired directed jammers from $1000 to $23,000, and all these are generally in the 1ooo – 2000 meter radius range. Some have GPS blockers.
Drones are so 20th Century.
If you murder people with drones in Afghanistan it’s just a matter of time before you do it in the US.
I suspect you might be right.
I have seen a number of these as well. Part of the problem is range – if a dropped explosive can hit a kill box from thousands of feet up, and you don’t know the drone is there…
Since Stingers are being handed out like candy in Ukraine to the criminal gangs, expect airplanes to start falling. Drones killing politicians will be small beer.
Well, 2,000 meters is pretty far. When I read your article, I thought you were talking about small inexpensive “suitcase” drones dropping armed antipersonnel bombs. Still, 2,000 meters up is 6,500 feet, so in order to hit one café table the bomb itself would have to be guided after release, I would think.
I don’t know what the range of the active anti-drone radio wave rifle is, but I doubt you could see a drone at 5,000 feet let alone aim at it.
Anyway, each café, or each private home if you yourself are a target, would probably have to have its own countermeasures. Which would be a bad development for society.
Battlefield/combat/etc killing is not murder.
Haven’t Democrats already suggested using them against their domestic enemies?
What if they’re non-combatants? Like, I dunno . . . a wedding party . . . just to use a crazy example.
Not if they weren’t deliberately targeted, and/or if it wasn’t known that it was a wedding party composed entirely of innocents.
All murders are homicides, but not all homicides are murder.
https://youtu.be/54hioQSUEaU?t=164
And cost more than a soon-to-be illegal AR-15.
Are you suggesting our intelligence agencies suck?
And would require electrical power and battery back up. The purely physical and chemical workings of an AR is certainly an advantage.
Wedding shmedding, they’d have grown up to be terrorists, the drone operator was just being proactive.It’s a matter of how much collateral damage (civilian deaths) one is willing to accept. And honestly, if civilian lives in other countries are discounted it’s just a matter of time before that attitude comes home.
I’d say it’s already come home. The concerted effort to label everyone slightly to the right of Hillary as a domestic terrorist is part of that. Arresting one’s political opposition on trumped-up charges is another part of that. They’re not droning us yet, but they will. Look at Waco. Look at Ruby Ridge. You know there are people who will do it without question.
The CJNG cartel in Mexico has already done it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2021/04/22/mexican-cartel-injures-police-officers-with-drone-bomb-attack/
The issue is not delivery systems aka the drone its the explosives. The Mexicans were on the forefront of developing cheap drop tech. Anyone can due to a DYI tech with off-the-shelf software and Rasberry Pie chips etc.
When it comes to delivery systems guns, etc. It is hard(aka not kill yourself making them) because of chemistry to make the good compact, ammo/explosives. Plus cheap drones work better if they have to swarm so it gets more prices.
Let your imaginations run free. If the top of the US no longer does its job of protecting borders and providing national defense, but is involved in everything it thinks might serve its interests, it’s difficult to exclude any sort of insanity. The drift, then flood, will be toward top down wealth extraction and concentration of power and at the bottom, spreading chaos. Probably while we can still produce stuff to kill and destroy efficiently we’ll use that a lot. The only folks who hold themselves together will be muslims, poor, dangerous aggressive, but coherent. The folks who want to concentrate power at the top of the biggest most complex society that ever existed don’t have a clue what they’re doing. Neither do the Chinese.
It could have happened almost ten years ago.
I was under the impression that happened on 9/11