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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: 5, Informative) by CoolHand on Thursday July 23 2015, @04:19PM
I think you assume that the only purpose of the amendment is to help proctect from foreign invasion. This is not true. From the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
So, in order to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government (which our founders knew all about), they crafted this amendment (along with other important amendments), and may have considered it the most important of all. The Bill of Rights is designed to protect the individual citizens rights against the tyranny of government. Don't tell me that with the way society is moving that this need may not be there. So get out of here with your unpatriotic anti-2nd amendment BS, and quit trying to take away my rights that I view as essential to a FREE man.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @01:23AM
The second amendment has no authority when the entirety of the constitution in which it is written has been subverted. The second only matters so long as the other 26 are also upheld, but now we live in a time when the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 13th, 14th, and 15th, at least, have been undermined, some more than others, yet nobody ever makes a peep about those. Where are all those zealots crying about the second being to protect all the other amendments while the other amendments are right now rendered useless or significantly diminished?