People are shooting down Walmart delivery drones | Hacker News Reader

People are shooting down Walmart delivery drones

qz.com

25 pointspseudolus29 comments

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?

Another concern are innocent people who may be harmed by the shells that missed the drone.

If it was an airplane it wouldn't be at 75ft agl, he probably wouldn't have shot at it, and if he did, the charges would have been significantly more severe. The drone was 75ft high. Pretty easy to see what it is clearly.

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.

Flying, hovering, and circling are all entirely different. It is not reasonable to shoot for flying. It is reasonable to shoot if hovering for a prolonged period exceeding say five minutes in a day, and it should ideally be legal. If circling, if the circle is sufficiently narrow and the drone sufficient low, it seems more reasonable to shoot it, but not otherwise.

I think that legal precedent is significantly out of date, as many municipalities now have daylight planes as part of their zoning codes, which mandate that sunlight at a certain angle must be able to hit a neighbor's property.

Does it include airplanes and satellites?

> 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?

I'm not sure what the right sentence is for shooting into the air at something which is going to crash to the ground, but it should be harshly punished. Either hitting or missing could easily kill someone.

There has to be a recognition of:

• size of target

• souls on board

• possibility of intrusion/spying

• type of projectile used

A 747 is huge, filled with people, and is not spying on you. To take it down, you would need serious artillery. At the far other end of the spectrum, if some drone is zipping around your house and videoing in your windows, are you allowed to do anything to take it down? Could you throw a baseball at it? Whack it with a pool skimmer?

There needs to be some nuance to recognize the massive differences between a SAM fired at a passenger jet and a pellet gun fired at a small unmanned drone snooping around your house.

A pellet gun is not taking down a delivery drone.

The topic isn't shooting a BB at a DJI Mini, it's shooting a bullet/slug from some sort of long gun at a delivery drone, one of these: https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2022/05/24/were-bringing-...

I agree that conflating airplanes and drones here is not ideal/correct, but as I said, both the bullet, and the drone, can easily kill someone if some reprobate decides to pop off at the drone.

I'd say a consecutive sentence for negligent discharge and reckless endangerment is about right, and bumped up to attempted manslaughter in places where it's crowded enough that this kind of behavior is straightforwardly as dangerous as, say, tossing a toaster oven off a tall building.

But sure, the penalty for shooting a Daisy Red Rider at one of the sub-250gm units should be indexed closer to property destruction/vandalism. If it's close enough to the ground to take a bead on it, it's not going to hit someone, and if it does, a laceration on the head is the worst outcome in the reasonable realm of possibility. Just don't be surprised if any legislation on this issue writes that particular scenario out of the picture.

Meh, 20 years is probably enough.

I think it's a reasonable punishment for putting bullets into the air with little idea where they might land—and on whom.

That would presumably already be against the law in many jurisdictions (cities, suburbs), so there wouldn't need to be an additional law to cover the situation where you're shooting at a drone versus a squirrel.

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.

IIRC a big problem with delivery drones is that their payload is limited by the damage that would be caused should the payload go into freefall. Going higher would just increase the ground impact speed.

I'm more worried about impact on people for which there should be at least a parachute where the higher altitude would give the chute more altitude to open. Also it should be cheap and easy to put something on the payload to slow its decent - like a maple seed.

Not really, the terminal velocity will limit it soon. The reason for the 400ft is more that general aviation is permitted from 500ft upwards (well, they must keep 500ft clearance from ground and buildings in all directions) and they can't coexist with drones. Especially automated ones.

Also it can be mitigated by the shape of the shell, have a parachute etc.

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

Is there any doubt that Walmart Inc. would not collect video routinely, including whatever happens to be happening at the delivery area? under the line of flight? of course they are..

I mean, I don't find it surprising. At all.

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. :)

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