Effective immediately: You need a license before you can throw an American football in the US because it might break a window.
How many decades were R/C planes and helicopters operating without a problem? Instead of police work, it's collective punishment with privacy invasion and barriers as the answer to salve MIC-generated paranoia. Firearms aren't even tracked this absurdly.
Many decades. My grandfather was an avid RC aircraft enthusiast.
They are simply not comparable to the drones that are being sold nowadays. 30, 40 years ago, RC aircraft were a seriously difficult and expensive hobby to get into. You generally had to build the plane yourself, including fitting the electronics and servicing the gasoline engine. They were huge and difficult to fly, too, so, after putting in all that investment, you generally wouldn't even consider flying it yourself without finding a mentor in the hobby to show you how it's done. And you'd generally have to do it out of an RC airstrip that was operated by an RC aviation club that was very interested in self-policing. Hijinks would get you kicked out.
So, yeah, 30, 40 years ago you didn't need something like this, because it was not a, "Some grandparent trying to Win Christmas can just blow $200 at Wal-Mart and give one of these to a 4-year-old," kind of thing. There were some much-needed barriers to entry back then. Nowadays apparently any idiot can have one, and yes, it is creating a legitimate problem. A couple years back I almost took a drone to the face when someone was whizzing it around at night, with the light off, trying to startle passersby for laughs. Thankfully I took it to the shoulder instead.
Ironically enough, this is what drove me into real airplanes. As a kid, did the line and rc models. Very easy to turn hundreds of hours of build time into... trash. The cost of the better RC stuff was darn near what you might spend on an ultra light for manned flying. It is amazing how cheap drones became (and the corresponding... how much general aviation has gotten to be).
This doesn't fit with my experience at all. They were somewhat expensive, yes, but only a bit more than a nice Lego set (which I got for Christmas one year). I don't even know if there was an aviation club nearby, but there were tons of RC airplane people that would just launch from their lawns.
Perhaps ironically, these very regulations are killing the "hobby" side of things.
I've built several FPV quadcopter, from ~1" all the way up to 11" (based on the size of the props). I've invested thousands of dollars in the hobby, countless hours, and have even fulfilled the HAM radio requirements.
The existing VLOS rules make it effectively illegal to fly them outdoors, period. Now, with this? No thanks. I'm done trying to fulfill arbitrary and ineffective requirements. I'll just fly my quads on my own property and if someone in a helicopter or a hang glider decides to dip below the treeline to fly under the power lines in my field, that's on them I guess.
The US has basically non-existent gun regulation by developed world standards. Go compare the gun violence rates in the US with any country that actually regulates guns.
>America has an 18 to one advantage over Brazil in the number of guns, yet proportionally, Brazil suffers six times more deaths by guns than America.
>In Brazil, all firearms must be registered with the state. Minimum age for owning a gun is 25 and restrictions make it virtually impossible to have a carry permit. Owners must pay a $40 tax every three years. As a result of these and other restrictions, it is very difficult to own a gun in Brazil much less carry one.
The data are high variance, so you can't just pick individual cases and then only look at selected facets of them. That's classic cherry picking.
You've got to look at large scale trends if you want to see a large scale pattern, and, if you want to dig into the particulars, you need to look at all the particulars. For example, that article you cite fails to consider the different levels of organized crime between the two countries. Perhaps because including that detail might necessitate acknowledging that Brazil and the USA have different gun crime problems with different causes that might therefore require different responses.
Given that the first sentence mentioned developed nations I figured it was clear I meant any developed nation. Furthermore, regulates guns generally means actually regulates guns and not "has laws for regulating guns." The two are not the same except in countries that have stable governments, enough money to pay for law enforcement and low amounts of corruption. Unless you actually believe the state of the US government and economy is akin to that of a country like Brazil?
You made an implicit argument that regulation doesn't work, I simply pointed out that it does in many many place.
You now argue that it doesn't work because the item being regulated is in wide spread possession. Drones are not. Thus by your own chain of reasoning it is perfectly reasonable to enforce very strong regulations NOW if we wish to have any chance of managing drones.
I guess, thank you for making such a great argument for strong regulation from the onset.
That's perhaps a true fact, but also, maybe a bit of a rhetorical own goal?
I don't think that the gun lobby having been so successful at achieving a sort of crony capitalist vendor lock-in with the American public implies in any way that this is a good thing, which is what you'd have to demonstrate for this analogy to really help the case you're trying to present.
I mean, if you're trying to say that regulation doesn't work, then pointing out that the the gun lobby has secured laws that severely limit firearm regulation in the USA, so now Americans already own a lot of guns and shoot each other a lot and there's nothing that can be done about it anymore, is perhaps doing more to illustrate the case that you're trying to argue against.
> now Americans already own a lot of guns and shoot each other a lot
Your analysis of the data may vary, but:
Between 1998 and 2019, there have been more than 391,897,875 background checks for gun purchases in the U.S.[1].
It is unknown which of those were for rifles; it is also unknown what percentage of those background checks were for multiple firearm purchases in a single transactions.
The AR-15 is the most popular rifle by far, so it seems entirely plausible that there are perhaps vastly more than 100 million AR-15's in private ownership in the U.S. (An interesting point is that it is rather unlikely that most people would be so unwise as to advertise ownership.) (Of note, there is no legal definition of assault rifle, and the "AR" in AR-15 stands for Armalite, one of the first manufacturers of the AR-15.)
In total, less than 400 killings (including murders, self-defense, suicide etc) per year committed with all types of rifles[2]. (In fact, more people are killed each year with blunt objects like clubs, hammers, etc.)
Those who wish to increase ownership of handguns would do well to note that many, many people in the U.S. own handguns for personal defense, and a very tiny fraction are used for killing in any given year. By far the largest handgun numbers are from people taking their own lives, and most of the others are from criminal activities, typically in large cities. Those criminal activities are committed by people who, by definition, do not obey the law.
This is obviously a politically fraught topic; just wanted to provide some actual, if somewhat surprising, data. Again, your analysis and politics may vary, but that's the data.
Why do you consider it unwise to advertise ownership of an AR-15? Why would anyone care? Where I live the response would be "cool, can I shoot it next range trip"
"the gun lobby has secured laws that severely limit firearm regulation in the USA"
The gun lobbies didn't secure laws that severely limit firearm regulation. They didn't have to. It was enumerated as the 2nd amendment in our constitution - and for damn good reasons.
The difference between the American and French Revolutions - the American Revolution started from the place that the people have all rights and our constitution restricts governments ability to infringe upon those inalienable rights. The French Revolution came from the perspective of the states rights and in turn grants rights to the people. I think I prefer the former over the latter.
Given the events of the last year and the historical opposition of groups like the NRA to minorities having gun access I feel the greatest threat to continuing free democracy in the US (for everyone) is not the government but the same group that owns the majority of guns.
Not commenting on whether the regulation is helpful or reasonable, but quadcopters are in practice different, pretty clearly.
I lived a long time before quadcopters became A Thing. I drive by a place (empty, rural field) where sometimes people fly R/C 'copters and airplanes. Lived lots of places. Nonetheless I bet I've seen at least 3x as many quadcopters in my life as other R/C aircraft, almost all in the last 6 or 7 years. I'm not sure I've ever seen those traditional R/C aircraft flying in a neighborhood, or out in a public area, or a small public park (not one with acres of empty space). Maybe a helicopter once? While that's the only place I see quadcopters. Indoors, at parks, at outdoor gatherings of all kinds, weddings, trails, everywhere.
Whether this difference warrants the regulation, I dunno, but there clearly is a difference.
I'm on the opposite end of experience than you and find a drone is often unpredictable in its flight. I just got a small (DJI Mini 2) drone in March and have been learning and flying as a recreational flyer as often as weather and time permits. According to the logs I have flown a mere 8 hours and 40 odd miles over 40 some flights. This small drone is easy to move quickly in nearly all directions while having 4 swiftly rotating blades that do not care what they touch and with no easy way to avoid. Wind gusts over 20 mph (easy to find over even just 75ft) can cause the craft to struggle to control, much less move in the direction intended.
Not to mention while I paid the smart sum of $600 for my kit (a high bar for many to spend on getting started in a hobby), DJI now has an even more approachable model at $299. Making the ability to get into the hobby more accessible is great, but it does come with a greater risk of even well-intentioned but under-educated people (or just knuckleheads) sending a drone up for a quick flight and smashing into someone/something without even reading the manual.
I'm a pretty cautious guy. I took a MSF course before buying a motorcycle, wear a helmet and gear, etc. I was very careful on my first few flights with my drone, but even then managed to crash into a stationary bird house. All this to say I am happy to take a simple test to prove to myself, much less those around me, that I know what the heck I'm doing and to keep myself and others safe because these things are very different from model aircraft and most consumer electronics that include a camera and gyroscopes. :)
20+ years ago when I flew models as a kid, the various clubs all required an AMA membership and a certain amount of flight time with a trainer. Seems like the hobby self-regulated a bit more back then.
I had similar thoughts, you don't need a permit to buy a gun but your kids need one if they want to fly their small toy drone, well that makes totally sense :D
When a football brings down an airplane, then we can have that discussion. Don’t know anyone throwing footballs at 500 feet in the approach course of an airport. There has to be a level of common sense involved in this discussion.
As far as the decades where R/C planes operated without a problem, you didn’t have millions of people flying those things. You also didn’t have the readily-available ability to fly them outside of line of sight.
How many decades were R/C planes and helicopters operating without a problem? Instead of police work, it's collective punishment with privacy invasion and barriers as the answer to salve MIC-generated paranoia. Firearms aren't even tracked this absurdly.