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Connecticut Student's Gun-Firing Drone Apparently Legal

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday July 23 2015, @01:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the drones-can-now-shoot-back dept.

takyon writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @03:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @03:30PM (#212708)

    As long as it is a public beach, I don't see what's wrong with the filming. If you don't want to be seen in bathing clothes, don't go to a public beach in bathing clothes.

    It the place was not public, then of course it was an invasion of privacy.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @03:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @03:41PM (#212715)

    As long as it is a public beach, I don't see what's wrong with the filming.

    Congratulations, you're an asshole too. Not everything that isn't explicitly forbidden is acceptable behavior.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @03:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @03:46PM (#212717)

      Calling random people assholes for not conforming to your very precise and very personal value system isn't acceptable behavior either. Ironic really.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @04:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @04:02PM (#212732)

        Neither is beating up an asshole who films women on the beach, but it happens for a reason.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @06:04PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @06:04PM (#212784)

          You are missing the point entirely and enticing violence. Again, ironic really.

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @06:20PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @06:20PM (#212792)

            I am not enticing anything. I am telling you that there are other codes of conduct beside the law and that those codes of conduct are enforced. The example was from the story, in case you missed it. I've said it before, but here it is again: If building a remote controlled flying gun and using it with live ammunition isn't illegal now, it soon will be. If people had some fucking common sense, hardly anything would have to be explicitly forbidden, but look how many laws there are. Speaks volumes to the qualities of our fellow men.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @08:31PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @08:31PM (#212841)

              You're just a vigilante asshole inciting violence over perfectly legal activities.

              Lindsey Graham, is that you?

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @12:54AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @12:54AM (#212953)

                "Legal" does not mean "moral" or "ethical". The Venn diagram of "legal" and "moral"/"ethical" has little overlap.

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @02:42AM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @02:42AM (#212981)

                  And everyone has a different opinion on each.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @09:36PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @09:36PM (#212864)

              Common sense says a lone man on private property doing something all by himself is not a danger to anyone else, but that is not your agenda. Common sense and "those codes of conduct" are whatever you want it to be at the moment. Certainly not a sane way to run a live let alone a society.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday July 23 2015, @07:53PM

          by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday July 23 2015, @07:53PM (#212827) Journal

          https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=8562&cid=212797 [soylentnews.org]

          There is no "asshole who films women on the beach". That was a fiction. There was a mentally ill woman who took offense with legal activity.

          Your informal vigilante justice may work some of the time, but its proponents will eventually land in prison, especially when cameras are recording their illegal "codes of conduct".

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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday July 23 2015, @06:38PM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday July 23 2015, @06:38PM (#212797) Journal

      What the woman claimed he did (hovering for some perv shots) didn't match the actual evidence. He was filming high above [youtube.com] the beach. She said: "He’s taking pictures of people on the beach ... with a helicopter plane." Not a reason for police to respond to the call. After she assaulted him, he called the police.

      The woman also lied and said that the teen assaulted her. The cops were initially ready to believe the woman rather than the teen, but he had all the video he needed [photographyisnotacrime.com]:

      I went to a nearby beach that is a whopping 2 miles long, set up, talked to some people that were curious what my “thing” was, demonstrated the loiter feature (pulling the quad to one direction or another), demonstrated rtl (flying it away then having it return), and make a lot of people think the quad was just awesome. I never went below 50 feet save for take off/landing, then after the end of my last flight, some crazy lady came over and started taking pictures of me…and dialed 911 for the 3rd time in 15 minutes…she said something to the effect of, “There’s a guy here taking pictures at the beach with a helicopter plane.” (I distinctly remember her saying, “with a helicopter plane,” because that just sounds hilarious.) They basically said that they’d send someone when one gets free during each of the 3 calls she made, she decided they didn’t care enough about someone obeying the law so when no one was around she assaulted me and she decided to stop when she got a phone call. I called the police to report the assault, and boy was the response big…10 or more vehicles arrived (cops, DEEP, and an ambulance)…They first listened to her story of lies (she claimed I was taking close ups of people in bikinis, and that she had asked me to stop flying before calling the police, and that I was the one that assaulted her, and and and). The police approached me very aggressively, believing her full story, and before anything else was said I brought up something that she missed… The fact that the cell phone in my hand has a camera…that was recording. I had video evidence that she went nuts completely unprovoked, and was the one that assaulted me. She was then charged with assault, and breach of peace and I gave the cops a copy of the video for their prosecution. I then also showed them my last flight where you can make out her colorful shirt getting up from the beach then following it until it lands which proved that she lied when claiming that she asked me to stop flying before calling the police.

      At the end of it all, one of the officers said to me basically, “Flying that thing the way you were is fine, you’re not in any trouble. You can come back and fly, but just be aware that some people can be alarmed.”

      Just a funny thing to add, last time I was there, a British guy had come up to me and said he thought it was a giant mosquito near him. He said that he first saw snake on a hike here in the States as they don’t have them in the UK, and thought giant mosquitoes were another animal they didn’t have.

      It's clear that the teen is not the asshole, and that in this case, what wasn't explicitly forbidden was both acceptable and normal, while the unacceptable behavior (lying to the police and assault) was not. Good thing he was filming, or the outcome could have been very different due to people who think like you.

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