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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Dear assholes,

Bullets have a ballistic trajectory and if you miss your target in a populated area, the bullet is quite likely going into someone's house or car.

              Signed,
              The Internet

(I'm not a fan of drones flying over my house either, but wtf people)

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Not that I would be likely to shoot at anything, but if I were shooting down a drone, I'd probably use a 12-gauge filled with birdshot. Assuming the shooter in this case chose similarly, then falling projectile damage is extremely unlikely. Possibly some eye injury if it landed just so, but looking at the sparse terrain this drone was flying over (if representative), it's hard to say whether or not shooting at the drone was dangerous per se.

Edit: Looking at the image[1] of the affected drone, it doesn't really look like a BB from a shotgun. It still could be, but it does look more like a .22 hole to me.

[1] - https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Photo...

If someone used a 12-gauge, I'm 100% certain they would have been seen doing it.

Why? None of this happened in an urban area.

Because the range of a 12-gauge is not so great, and the noise is loud enough to make people watch.

This seems likely to me. Gun owners would be familiar with shooting a flying object down with a shotgun loaded with birdshot.

It would be the intuitive thing to grab, and more likely to hit something. A small gauge one, like a .410, would even be relatively quiet (louder than a .22 rifle, but quieter than most other types of guns).

> Assuming the shooter in this case chose similarly, then falling projectile damage is extremely unlikely.

This varies by locality but in anything you'd ordinarily consider a suburban residential neighborhood, this would still amount to unlawful discharge of a firearm, I would think. If not fired into a backstop those little pellets are going to fall to earth and embed themselves into something.

I'd say it varies too much by locality to even generalize about. In the parts of the south I've lived in, the unlawful discharge laws tend to only apply to MUCH denser population centers. I know of a case in Arkansas in which a husband shot the wall behind where his wife was standing in a domestic dispute. But because she wouldn't say that he was shooting at her, and there's no law against shooting your own wall in the sticks, there was nothing to be done about it.

The individual pellets in 12 gauge number 8 birdshot weigh less than 0.08 grams and measure .09″ in diameter.

Falling birdshot isn't embedding itself into anything. Direct blast, sure.

Let's hope they won't use anything else than a 12-gauge with birdshot.

A guy in my school was hit in the head while driving. He died instantly.

It was a bit of a mystery until they found out he was hit by a stray bullet that went through the open side window, shot at 40 degrees angle more than 6 kilometres away, from a military shooting range.

(It was a low caliber bullet, but I can't remember exactly what weapon it was.)

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