Retailers have had to solve a long list of technological, regulatory, and commercial challenges in order to offer deliveries by drone.
But one complication remains especially difficult to predict: US gun owners.
In the latest episode, the Lake County Sheriff said last week that Dennis Winn admitted to shooting a Walmart drone with a 9mm pistol as it flew near his home in Florida.
According to the arrest affidavit, Winn told officers he had prior experience with drones flying over his house and believed the aircraft to be surveilling him.
He then went inside, got his gun from a safe, came out, and fired one shot at the drone, which was roughly 75 feet in the air, the affidavit said.
“I then told him that he had struck a Walmart drone,” the Sheriff’s deputy said in the affidavit. “The defendant looked in disbelief and questioned, ‘Really?'”
The Sheriff’s Office said a bullet hole was found in the payload area of the drone after it flew back to a nearby Walmart.
The office said Winn was taken into custody and faces three charges, including “shooting at an aircraft.”
In the past decade, some US gun owners have shot at unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, but what many may not realize is they are committing a serious crime in the eyes of the federal government.
The Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t distinguish between a small drone and a jumbo passenger jet when it comes to attempts to sabotage commercial aircraft: shooting at one is a felony, punishable by a fine and up to 20 years in prison.
Even though the FAA has held this position since 2016, the message doesn’t seem to have gotten through to some people. The agency only recently started allowing unmanned commercial aircraft to fly beyond the operator’s direct line of sight.
In the past two years alone, incidents in North Carolina, Florida, and California made headlines when individuals with guns targeted drones — two of which belonged to law enforcement.
As more retailers use drones, armed Americans pose a potential complication to deliveries by air.
Two years ago, when Amazon was rolling out a test of its drone delivery service in California, The Washington Post reported that one man at a local archery shop joked that it was “Target practice!”
Now Walmart is expanding its use of drones beyond the initial test markets, where the company says it has conducted over 20,000 safe deliveries. The retail giant’s goal is to have the “largest drone delivery footprint of any US retailer.”
And Walmart isn’t alone. Earlier this year, DoorDash announced a drone delivery test with a Wendy’s restaurant in Virginia, and several Chick-fil-A restaurants have tested the tech in recent years as well.
Perhaps if drones become common enough, people will simply stop noticing — or shooting — them.
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