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Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

There's no such thing as a non-lethal weapon: there are only less lethal weapons.

Even a fist can be lethal, either by design or bad luck.

When you start using weapons, you start risking deaths.

That's not to say that all use of weapons is always morally, wrong, but it IS designed to deflate the idea that force can be used without risk.

A few years back Boston cops use a "non lethal" pepper ball, shot a student straight in the eye, penetrated her brain, and dropped her in a fraction of a second, stone dead.

http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2004/1...

Police also kill people all the time using "non lethal" tasers. The firm manufacturing them and the police have a vested and shared interest in denying that any of these deaths were actually caused by the weapons; it is - apparently - sheerest coincidence that people die of heart attacks at the same time that they're hit with 50,000 volts.

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This is exactly what I was thinking. Not only that, this also leads to a slippery slope argument. Maybe later they'll announce that, in certain crime infested areas they have slightly stronger non-lethal weapons and allow it to escalate it from there. After that project an area as total mob territory and say that you absolutely need lethal weapons just to protect the drones since the criminals have technology to capture it and they don't want them to reverse engineer it, because if they do then this is a potential threat to the freedom loving people. So, first they'll start with self-destructive weapons and then slowly make it more potent until it becomes deadly lethal. And then they'll say that it costs too much to make different variants and that your tax money can be used for something better if you allowed them to make just one model. They PROMISE not to use it unless absolutely necessary and it is at that point in time you know, shit has officially hit the fan.

That's a very broad definition. With enough effort and (bad) luck, almost anything can be lethal. It then become convenient to differentiate things which are designed to kill (lethal weapons), things which are designed to incapacitate without killing (non-lethal weapons) and things not designed to do either (not weapons).

Your definition would place almost everything into one category: lethal weapons. And that isn't very useful.

Do there need to be shades of grey when we're talking about weaponizing drones? This just shouldn't happen. What's not useful is creating rhetorical space in which the acceptability of this technology is debatable.

The fact is, we need to scale down the militarization of police across the board, not debate how quickly or in what form advanced military technology should be given to the police.

Exactly. There should be no debate about whether these weapons can be lethal. The debate should be about whether there should be civilian drones at all, and why the hell they need weapons mounted to them.

Humans in the heat of the moment do stupid violent things. I would bet weaponized drones would cause less fatalities than in person officers. Make the decisions completely autonomously by computer and you will probably see even less mistakes. Plus, there is a huge class of crime, the inner city, where police do practically nothing currently. Drones might well stop gang violence.

The possibilities really become clear though internationally. If foreign governments, such as mexico, recruit drones, they might well solve their violence problems pretty quick.

I don't see how the international angle affects the debate on whether they should be used in the US.

This is a joke, right? Weaponized drones controlled by a fully automatic computer? Jesus, just try to make a computer that decides when it's safe to cross the street.

Foregoing discussion because something "just shouldn't happen" is not really the best way forwards. It would be if everybody clearly agreed on what should be, but people clearly don't.

For what it's worth I actually agree with your premise: I would like the police's capabilities limited as well. However, part of being rational is questioning weak arguments regardless of whether they support your point or not.

Just taking your conclusion as an axiom with no support is not particularly conducive to reasoned discourse. (This is why arguing religion with the truly devout is rather difficult--God is axiomatic to them.)

Logic is the best tool we have--save perhaps for the scientific method--to make decisions. It's worth maintaining regardless of the issue in question.

So yes--there always need to be shades of gray. Reasonable people reasonably disagree on almost every issue, because basically no nontrivial issue that isn't contrived is entirely obvious.

Perhaps you are fundamentally correct and your arguments stronger--I certainly think so. But this does not mean the issue should not be discussed. I've been wrong before!

Anyhow, I've gone well off-topic now, and I'm typing this on a cell phone. I think discussion is always useful, and it took me an absurd number of words to say that, do I'll say no more.

Actually, one interesting thing about drones is that, in theory, _all_ activity can be logged. And secondly, the person operating it is in no danger, so there would be absolutely no justification for excessive use of force, because even if someone, say, pulled a gun and shot the drone... oh well, it's just a drone.

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