There are a lot of comments here and elsewhere about how effective drone strikes would have been in lieu of the supposedly 'heavy-handed' reaction to two men running around the city with bombs, shooting people.
I figured this is a discussion we may want to have in a focused manner - and we may want to consider some things before we continue to support the idea of drone strikes in major urban cities.
We'd be setting the precedent of using military strikes as law enforcement in U.S. cities.
What if we "droned" the "dark skinned hooded" guy or the "suspicious" burn victim Saudi man? Or the track star on the cover of the NY Post? Oh, oops??
We may despise them for the heinous murderers they were, but neither of these men had been convicted of anything.
We'd be sending rockets into a crowded urban area. We kill civilians with drones in sparsely populated areas in Afghanistan. Imagine setting Watertown on fire.
We'd be killing the only people we know who are connected to the crime and have information, including whether there are bombs in place around the city and where and who else is involved or in charge.
We would have had to shut down all air traffic within a wide area, snarling up the rest of the nation's airports as they cancel flights into and out of Boston and New York and New Jersey and Rhode Island and Connecticut and New Hampshire . . .
We'd be lending legitimacy to the idea of using drone strikes around the world.
We'd be supporting xenophobic and racist gop hacks who prefer military solutions and military tribunals and Gitmo and torture over law enforcement and our justice system.
Who decides whether a drone strike is warranted? Someone like: Bernie Sanders? Jimmy Carter? George Bush? Barack Obama? Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? Drone strikes are military strikes, not decided by state or local law enforcement.
I'm sure there are more things we'd need to take into consideration. Let's get it together people.
Military drone strikes used as a law enforcement tool in crowded urban areas, exposing civilians to what could be multiple casualties, to kill people who have not been convicted of a crime but who might have many bombs, grenades, and bomb-making materials (which go off when the strike hits), obliterating any chance of finding out where bombs or terrorists are, and making a mockery of our system of justice, and the decision is up to someone whose ideology we can't predict.
This is not who we are.