Hacker News Reader

Comment by bleepblorp | Hacker News Reader

If this kind of thing keeps up it wouldn't be much of a stretch for drones to be banned from civilian ownership in many parts of the world.

View on HN

The issue will be enforcement of these laws.

How will you regulate the possession and distribution of IMUs and electric motors?

Hell most of the parts you need to build a drone are available in a used cellphone and many of the rest can be 3d printed.

It is quite easy to make your own bombs and firearms as well, all with perfectly legal materials. They may not have the effectiveness of commercially made versions, but they'll get the job done in a pinch.

Typically, I think, laws against possession of such homemade illegal goods are enforced as add-on charges to other crimes, unless you are selling them.

There was a German terrorist trying to shoot up a Synagogue in Halle. He had an impressive stash of homemade firearms yet none of them were powerful enough to actually open the thick wooden gate to the synagogue. A ladder and a knife would have killed more people.

You're going to run into the same situation with drones. It is easy to imagine some super complicated drone based attack scheme when there are far simpler and more effective methods of taking care of a target involving firearms.

To underscore your point, here's an example of how easy it is to get god-tier military hardware in Mexico from one of the many people breaking bad across the border in the US.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/arming...

This fella in Texas was selling .50-cals and miniguns straight to the Cartels for years. There are likely many, many more like him.

Mexican think tanks have spent years trying to figure out how the hell to stop the massive flow of weapons into Mexico from Texas and Arizona.

https://www.mexicoevalua.org/mexicoevalua/wp-content/uploads...

US think tanks too, notably David Shirk at USD has done a bunch of work on this.

https://catcher.sandiego.edu/items/peacestudies/way_of_the_g...

There was an absolutely trivial solution: send a few fighter planes to blow up the haciendas and spray herbicide on the plantations. But the US government prefers to profit and make political hay from the drug war.

I think a lot of it has shifted over into meth as well, with the availability of cheap precursors from China, and loose security on ports.

Can't stop it at the source anymore.

In 2019 the Trump administration considered formally designating the Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations. They backed off on that approach, but had they gone ahead it probably would have led to drone strikes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50697635

Dude that's how you get the child of American senators kidnapped andmailed back in pieces or another 9/11.

Everything sounds simple in theory until you think of the consequences.

It's been tried. It didn't work.

If they made it legal to shoot them on sight in Texas that would go a long ways here to keep their numbers down.

As far as I know C4 isn't for civilians either..

Tannerite is, though. (And where it isn't, blasting charges for mining are. And where those aren't, fertilizer probably still is. Explosives are hard, yet also far easier than you'd think)

Buy those things and you’ll end up on a list and under surveillance quickly.

Doesn't that imply you're already under surveillance? The list that we're on is: anyone who is alive and can be surveiled.

No, but there are specific collaborations for high risk purveyors of things like explosive precursors.

If you show up at a farm store to buy certain fertilizers in unusual quantities, that interaction will likely be reported or otherwise flagged.

You'll find that regular fertilizer has explosion retardant additives. Which made me think (and was confirmed later) that the Beirut explosion was 'weapons grade' ammonium nitrate, rather than the stuff sold to civilians.

For instance; https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cen-v073n022.p006

Really all it takes is for one incident where someone gets killed. We live in a ban-happy society that doesn't consider the consequences of banning absolutely everything except maybe videogames.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com