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An 18-year-old student in Clinton, Connecticut has led the Federal Aviation Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and local police to investigate after his video of a quadcopter drone firing a handgun went viral.
According to his father, Austin Haughwout assembled the drone warrior for a college class project with the help of a professor at Central Connecticut State University. A spokesman for the university said that the professor strongly discouraged Haughwout and that the drone wasn't related to a class project. The 14-second video, posted on YouTube on July 10th, shows a quadcopter hovering and firing a semiautomatic handgun (unconfirmed that this was a Kel-Tec PMR-30 pistol) four times in midair. CNN reports that the agencies involved haven't found any evidence of wrongdoing:
"We are attempting to determine if any laws have been violated at this point. It would seem to the average person, there should be something prohibiting a person from attaching a weapon to a drone. At this point, we can't find anything that's been violated," Clinton Police Chief Todd Lawrie said. [...] The Federal Aviation Administration and federal law agencies are also investigating "to determine if there were any violations of criminal statutes," the FAA said.
[...] Law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes, a former director of the FBI, said he believed the gun drone could be illegal as a form of reckless conduct. "What if the drone gets beyond the distance of the radio control? We had that drone land on the front lawn of the White House," Fuentes said. Earlier this year, a U.S. intelligence agency employee lost control of a borrowed personal quadcopter drone, which crashed on the White House lawn. "Do we want drones out of control that could land who knows here? We could have a child pick up the drone, pick up the gun, and accidentally kill themselves. I see the whole thing as reckless conduct," Fuentes said.
This isn't the teen's first taste of national drone fame. He was assaulted by a 23-year-old woman last year while taking aerial footage of a beach using an unarmed quadcopter. Despite assaulting a minor and lying to the police whom she had called to the scene, in contradiction of video evidence from the drone and Haughwout's iPhone, she received just 2 years probation.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 23 2015, @03:26PM
Even in very rural areas, firing blindly into the forest is considered reckless. I believe that the laws nationwide are in agreement that a hunter MUST NOT shoot blindly at sounds, because so many hunters have been killed in exactly that fashion.
MOST hunters have pretty good ethics about shooting into the woods. I'm at least a half step ahead of most of them though. I may miss my target - everyone does now and then. But, I KNOW where my bullet went. Because I don't blink when the weapon fires, I KNOW where my sights were aligned with when it fired. And, if I'm unsure about what I may have hit, I walk out there and investigate.
Yeah, we're in agreement about firing randomly, and it applies anytime, anywhere. Even if some park ranger could assure me that I was the ONLY PERSON in the woods, there was no other person with twenty miles, I still couldn't spray the woods with bullets. It's stupid!
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday July 23 2015, @05:26PM
Even in very rural areas, firing blindly into the forest is considered reckless.
Why is that reckless but aiming said gun through a small LCD showing compressed video sent via radio isn't?
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(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 23 2015, @07:09PM
But, I KNOW where my bullet went. Because I don't blink when the weapon fires, I KNOW where my sights were aligned with when it fired.
So, one of the most important safety factors in your shooting is visually verifying your target and aim.
How do you do that from a quad-copter? Or, is the project intrinsically unsafe?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 23 2015, @11:35PM
That quad copter was hovering within the boys visual sight. The video of the shooting was taken by another off-board camera. The shooting took place in a controlled environment, that is, he didn't fly the copter 1/2 mile down the road, and out of sight.
What I would like to see, it the video FROM THE COPTER. I want to see how he aimed the weapon, and how he worked the whole thing.