Interesting that none of the news articles I've read about this cover the aspect that police is shooting guns in the air in a populated area. Aside from the drone issue that's highly dangerous behavior, you don't know where those bullets are going to land.
Considering that they've been recorded intentionally firing teargas canisters at the heads of protesters, I don't think they're overly concerned about their wellbeing.
I was under the impression that firing into the air, especially in limited amounts, was generally non-fatal. The Wikipedia article on Celebratory Gunfire seems to confirm my assumption. Deaths and injuries are possible, but usually only accompanying large amount of gunfire.
There actions are still not without fault, but I can imagine a few more important aspects of this issue that we could be debating.
In the case of a bullet fired at a precisely vertical angle (something extremely difficult for a human being to duplicate), the bullet would tumble, lose its spin, and fall at a much slower speed due to terminal velocity and is therefore rendered less than lethal on impact. However, if a bullet is fired upward at a non-vertical angle (a far more probable possibility), it will maintain its spin and will reach a high enough speed to be lethal on impact. Because of this potentiality, firing a gun into the air is illegal in most states, and even in the states that it is legal, it is not recommended by the police. Also the MythBusters were able to identify two people who had been injured by falling bullets, one of them fatally injured. To date, this is the only myth to receive all three ratings at the same time.
I remember it differently. The bullet would tumble back down so long as the angle didnt allow for the bullet to arc over. You do t have to shoot up perfectly for it to fall backwards and tumble down. There's a pretty wide margin for shoot up that would cause the bullet to fall back on itself and not cause as much harm as a bullet which held an arc.
It's unlikely that it will hit someone, but it can, so you don't do it. Remember rule 4: know your target and what's beyond it. You don't pull the trigger unless you know where each projectile will come to rest.
A bullet will lose sufficient velocity so that it no longer lethal relatively quickly. As an example we can use FBI specs for maximum range of the NATO standard issue M855 cartridge for 5.56mm , which is 3600 yards. Ballistics show a trajectory with 2200 foot drop at that range and a final velocity of 490fps with a retained energy of only 33ft/lbs (about 3% of muzzle energy). To attain impact at 3600 yards requires the rifle to be elevated at about 11 degrees. In reality, the bullet is likely to lose enough rotational velocity that it will destabilize much earlier, which will even more rapidly decrease velocity and power.
So, put simply, for this cartridge shooting in the air at an angle greater than 11 degrees relative to the horizon would not be particularly dangerous.
I was at a New Year's Eve party one time when a bullet pierced the roof of an awning covering the back porch. The impact was loud enough that we heard it over the music and cheering ringing in the new year.
The roof was constructed of corrugated aluminum. Not the strongest stuff in the world, but the bullet passed through two sheets of this material on its way in. We estimated the entry angle at around 40-45° by looking upward through the holes, aligning the light that shined through them (the following day).
Having seen it first hand, I would dispute the assertion that shooting in to the air at a high angle isn't particularly dangerous.
Did you recover the bullet? Measurements of the bullet would hint at the cartridge used, which would let us calculate how and where the round was fired.
There are certainly cartridges in production that carry dramatically more kinetic energy than the example I used, but the more powerful cartridges tend to be more rare.
Note that as velocity bleeds off the trajectory degrades faster and faster, resembling an upside down exponential curve. The angle of impact is much greater than the angle at which the round was fired; more so as distance increases.
We couldn't find it. It entered the roof near the edge, continued through the screen, and in to the ground outdoors. We did a lot of digging around, but ultimately were unable to recover the round.
The holes in the aluminum roof were round (ruling out a tumbling rifle round) and were definitely larger than .22 caliber. Most gun discharges on occasions like New Year's are handguns, so it could have been any number of handgun rounds in the .35-.40 caliber range. It wasn't large enough to have been 45ACP or .44 Mag. It could have been a .30 caliber rifle round, but given the estimated angle of entry, I would have assumed it would tumble by then. To leave such a clean entry/exit hole would seem unlikely for a tumbling rifle round.
A round with with those characteristics, while far from preferable as a weapon (not at all a "reliable" or "clean" kill) remains capable of killing in a very unlucky shot or causing a serious but nonlethal injury.
One doesn't refrain from hunting deer with 22LR because the 22LR (at about three times this energy) isn't dangerous, but because it is difficult to get a shot that produces an instant kill with > 90% probability, and one is more likely to chase and possibly lose a deer that is slowly bleeding to death. Hunters that are insensitive to the deer's suffering and willing to give chase will accept a 50% probability and brag about it later.
Cartridges are dangerous in terms of intentions. For example during istanbul unrest, tens of people lost their eyes, suffered from traumas in the head because of the cartridges shot from short distance intentionally. You can find video of police celebrating upon shooting a protestor in the head with cartridge on youtube. You can find a picture of the janitor after being shot directly in the eye with cartridge, on the following site http://delilimvar.tumblr.com/page/7 . Nothing man made are dangerous at all, but intentions make them so.
Oh yes, of course. I've never heard "shooting in the air" used to describe shooting directly at a building, though, so I was making an assumption there.
For this story you heard... what cartridge was used? What bullet weight? What muzzle velocity? Where was the gun pointed? Do you have any actual information to share?
There is plenty of information about the law but I can find very little specific information about the actual incident besides a news report stating that "police believe it was fired straight up within a mile of Shannon's home."
This doesn't tell us much unfortunately. From Hatcher's testing done in the 1920's he found terminal velocity of a bullet fired straight up which does not destabilize is about 300fps, which with a fairly heavy .30-06 bullet results in about 30ft/lbs of energy. He noted that it was typically accepted that 60ft/lbs of energy was required to produce a disabling wound.
Of course, even at 30ft/lbs is it possible though statistically improbable that a falling bullet could strike in such a way as to cause serious injury or death.
It's very hard to get good numbers on injuries and deaths from this phenomenon, but the evidence points to it being an extraordinarily uncommon occurrence despite the fact that some cities, such as Dallas, report up to 1000 complaints for celebratory gunfire per year.
If I put on a blindfold, and start randomly shooting around in various directions, I might not hit anybody. 0 fatalities! Does this make my actions "not dangerous?"
Such indiscretions will be forgiven by the courts because the police will have acted in the interest of public safety, look at the Chris Dorner fiasco in Los Angeles, USA for example.
Yes, if they're actually acting in the interest of public safety, e.g. if a stray bullet meant for a dangerous gunman hits an innocent civilian.
The Chris Dorner fiasco came about because the LAPD fired on civilians they believed to be Dorner, they were incompetent in doing so, but firing on a suspected dangerous gunman is not a bad thing in principle.
But as far as I can tell the cops had no reason to suspect that there was any imminent danger from these flying robots, and were firing in the air just because they didn't like being recorded.
Firing into the air in a civilian area seems to me to be a much bigger issue than them trying to suppress news coverage of protests.
There was a case not many years ago at New Years in New Orleans of a woman dying from this, and if you "DuckDuckGo" it you can find other similar news stories.
So for all the mathematics posts in reply to your post, the real answer is, "Yes, it can happen. Yes, it is a dangerous thing to do"
>> Governments are fond of the question: Why do you mind us watching, if you have nothing to hide? As both the size and price of this sort of technology decreases, it may reverse the roles of citizen and ruler. If five tiny camera drones hover over a clash between protesters and police, whichever side chooses to gun them down may invite that very same question.
This information is incredibly hard to get from most multirotor makers, because it's always really bad and they don't like to be compared to each other.
From the battery size & numbers for this general class of quad I'd guess 15-20 minutes (confidence +/- 5 minutes), although that depends whether you put a camera on or not, and if so what.
Our DJI S800 airframes will go to 30 minutes with a full load of batteries, but they are much larger and more efficient.
A thought I just had: a very small cheap camera on the top of the drone to capture the color of the sky and a way to paint the drone (or at least the bottom, using maybe LEDs) to use the color captured by that camera. Might be expensive though.
a cruise missile is a UAV that crashes deliberately, and carries an explosive payload.
A UAV that's big enough to carry a grenade or something equivalent, plus the grenade itself, probably won't be much cheaper than a handgun, and it's a single-use weapon. It does have the tactical advantage of being difficult to detect or trace, and of allowing the attacker to be a long distance away when making the attack.
You make a couple of reasonable, but unwarranted, assumptions. You assume that 'grenade' refers to something like an infantry grenade. However in weapons circles, things have a 'CEP' which is the circular error probability that describes the probability that your target will be destroyed based on various distances from the activation of the weapon. In the case of drones, since one could, in theory, manually fly it in very very close to the target, the CEP could be quite small for the device used. Small CEP devices can be made more easily than large CEP devices, and they are lighter.
My thought was to fly a drone up and video my daughters graduation from college, but my wife pointed out to me that it would probably end poorly for the drone (and completely change the tone of memories she should have of her graduation). So I decided against it :-)
Even the cheapest UAV-explosive is more expensive than the explosive without the UAV. A UAV that's "cheaper than a handgun" [0] (as in the grandparent post) is, at present, going to have a payload of perhaps a couple of ounces. How many feet of lethal radius can you get from a couple ounces of payload? How "very very close" can you actually manually fly a UAV with a small bomb attached?
Being able to kill someone with a disposable weapon, and not be spotted by onlookers or security tapes, is still potentially a security nightmare. I'm just not convinced that "cheaper than a handgun" is the present or near-future reality for such a weapon.
[0] cheap handguns are under $250, and rifles can be under $200. Prices taken from http://www.impactguns.com/
The simplest explosive would probably be a single .380 or 9mm pistol round with the primer replaced by an electric igniter. In the field when a gun back fires it often seriously injures the person holding it and people near the weapon. The NATO 9mm pistol round [1] weighs less than 20g and has 600j of energy. Probably wouldn't use the lead bullet. I can imagine (as I am sure others can) an enclosure for this which would not increase the weight significantly but would convert it into an omnidirectional device.
I don't doubt for a moment that you could seriously injure an unarmored individual with something like that within 2 or 3 feet.
The big issue is that 'terrorism' is not about inflicting harm, but fear of harm.
A few quad rotor UAVs outfitted as you describe, possibly even with frangible rounds or just dropping tiny flechettes such as those used from the air in WWI, would easily cause panic.
For that matter, "suicide" UAVs that are either capable of delivering a lightweight shrapnel load without concern for the vehicle's survivability, or just using the kinetic energy of the moving vehicle and the rotating blades to crash into crowds, especially in some sort of flock, would discourage a lot of people from gathering in public places, going to clubs, sporting events, malls, tourist attractions, etc.
Sorry, I'm not from the US and with a cursory google for gun shops found that a Glock pistol of some description (a brand I recognise) is ~$500.
If you have access to basic tools (as in, hacksaw and glue), you can build your own fixed-wing airframe using $100 of foam, carbon rods, and off-the-shelf motors, ESCs, batteries & props & servos[2]. See RCGroups for hundreds of downloadable designs. Your radio control gear will cost you about $40 for the cheap stuff[3]. An ArduPilot 2.5 autopilot is $180 off the shelf [4].
The thing is, if you are building your own scaling up (within reasonable bounds) doesn't really change the price. Something Skywalker sized (~2m wingspan) is easily build-able by almost anyone and will easily take 1kg of payload. $120 dollars[1] gets you a video link & camera with a 20-30km range you can use to fly the thing straight into whatever you like.
So the dumb GPS targeted version is 100 + 40 + 180 = $320
The video targetted version is 320 + 120 = $440
Obviously, that doesn't include the 1kg of 'payload'.
The use of "cruise-missle"-like UAV would likely be different than a handgun. Militaries don't usually use cruise missiles to go after individuals; the asset cost to target value is not proportional in most cases.
Instead, bullets, dumb missiles (target, fire and forget), or (laser) guided missiles from re-usable launch platforms are used instead for those tasks. Cruise missiles are used against larger fixed assets.
I would expect that if "civilian" UAV design evolved toward urban insurgency, the payloads would be used against police stations, radio towers and vehicles rather than individual officers. Getting enough aerial carrying capacity to do disabling damage might not be worth the cost right now, but that equation could change with either better UAVs, or more organized use of urban insurgent tactics.
The second video is definitely cool. At the end I was waiting for a crack in the glass, or the drone tumbling out of control and then the static screen, but was disappointed.
The first video of the "shooting down" looked very simulated and kind of dumb.
A very interesting future awaits us. I do think however that if drones get to be a problem government authories turn off data feeds to drones by snooping in on cell phone tower data streams. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that their weakness?
They can only be controlled from a distance by having a data plan and being connected to a cell phone tower. That opens up all sorts of terrorist possibilities, and the only way of really combating terrorism in a world of drones is by recording cell phone data streams.
Drones like this one aren't reliant on phone networks at all. They tend to use the 2.4GHz band for the pilot control link, and sometimes also for telemetry back to the pilot.
The video links are analogue transmitters on 900MHz, 1.2, 2.4 or 5.8GHz depending on personal preference and local laws.
However, you can operate these things in fully autonomous mode. You can start a few km away, fire it off, and in 10 minutes it will fly back with a memory card full of whatever. You can even program the landing spot to be different to the take-off spot & program feints. I'd personally land it somewhere secluded where I can safely watch for activity.
If there's an hint of trouble, just leave it and power up the next one...
It's entirely possible (and in fact would be a very fun hobby project for me some day) to build a hybrid autonomous drone (via GPS, gyro, accelerometer, compass, range finders, etc) that takes a queue of commands or even little high level command scripts and executes them. Video would be stored locally as well as broadcast back in real-time, in case of jamming attempt.
Edit: Apparently, according to other commenters, there are already open-source autonomous quad-copters you can hack on, which is great news to me! (And you can buy the hardware preassembled).
"They can only be controlled from a distance by having a data plan and being connected to a cell phone tower." - not really. You could control one using a good directional Wi-Fi antenna - I remember setting up a Wi-Fi link over a kilometer distance using a 30 quid antenna bought on ebay.
