I have been doing a lot of thinking, lately. About drones and what they really mean. It is a matter of perspective, and I fear that we the people are dropping the ball on considering just how dangerous and sinister drones are and will continue to be.
You see, as I read story after story about 5, 10, 20 year prison sentences being handed down to adults who choose to consume cannabis, and as I think about the Second Amendment and the arguments concerning the importance of keeping government tyranny in check, I realize that nothing is actually happening to keep any government tyranny in check. Government tyranny is not something we necessarily see--it can be embedded deep within the chess game played between the leaders and those they lead.
In my 40-some years of life, I have had a number of truly fearful moments. When I was a kid hiking in the Santa Catalina Mountains, I almost fell to my death on a bed of sliding shale. At 18, I was in a pretty bad motorcycle accident, waking up in the hospital after 24 hours or so of being unconscious. On September 11, 2001, I was working at my office at Broadway and Chambers in Lower Manhattan when the first plane flew directly into the North Tower. I have an experience-based idea of what danger is, and I like to think of myself as wise enough to get it. I have grown to appreciate the meaning of concern over the years, and I am growing very concerned about drones and what seems like a big lack of public interest in their ongoing development.
Regardless of your perspective, drones make killing impersonal to a whole new level, as in totally. With drones, survival of the fighters on the drone side is no longer an immediate motivation to mitigate the damages of warfare. Kill and win, like the atomic bombs dropped in Japan, make the victory so complete and psychologically devastating that there is simply no coming back--that is the end game with drones.
I get the Second Amendment folks. I really do. We are not in disagreement on many core issues. I read the RKBA diaries, and I know how important the Second Amendment rights are to many people in America. In fact, the Second Amendment is one of the most unique aspects of our supreme law. Growing up in southern Arizona, I have shot and reloaded thousands of rounds in my lifetime, which means I have spent meaningful time with many who have done the same. But things are starting to feel extraordinarily different in 2013 because of drones.
The "preventing government tyranny" line of thought is something I grew up with. I have heard it many, many times stated by very serious people in a convincing, passionate, and thoughtful manner. And I always thought pot heads and gun fans should band together to protect their freedoms, even though they often stand diametrically opposed on the social issues.
Freedom to smoke pot is freedom. Others would argue that freedom to keep you from smoking pot on their property is freedom, too. Same with guns. Same with birth control. Same with marriage. And all the rest. Freedom, true freedom, is the power to exercise your will. So we modify in response to reality--freedom means freedom over your land and body but not that of others', etc. We all know the arguments. We are all familiar with the complexities. Liberty is messy.
Back to drones. It is really important to think critically about what we are doing with them. Afghanistan appears to be a bastion of freedom for our military. Far away, significantly "other," and doomed for failure so hopeless. But for our military, live testing of drones means real data on how to make these machines better and increase efficacy--it is a test track, so to speak, without limits, and test tracks have proven to be essential to automobile development on virtually all issues involving safety, control, handling, everything. I would be willing to bet a lot of money that ABS braking systems did not see public sales lots until extensive testing on closed circuit tracks was completed, with a lot of the "fails" kept secret from consumer review.
That said, imagine how important such test tracks are to drones. It is like the guy who lies a little bit all the time--when something really big comes along, why would you ever expect him to tell the truth about that?
So potheads keep getting arrested in 2013 despite all of the scientific and common sense data available that clearly demonstrates pot essentially hurts no one. Potheads are not dying of cancer; they are not going crazy with withdrawal shakes; and they do not start bar fights. There is even data available suggesting the radical--pot helps many more than it hurts. So who are we protecting by arresting anyone who has anything to do with pot?
Yet the Second Amendment guys are not fighting that tyranny. Because it is not bad enough? Must the government tyranny argument be modified to "government tyranny and I really meany government tyranny?"
Try to imagine smoking some pot at the end of the day on your balcony watching the sun set while you sip on a delicious beer, really enjoying those organic beer nuts. Easy to imagine. Now, try to imagine aiming a gun at government officials who have come to take something from you--for most rational folks, it already is a "no-can-do" situation.
I mean, that is just extreme. It is suicide. It is death-by-cop. Look at that dude in Pennsylvania who just got fired for shooting automatic weapons in the middle of the forest and posting on Youtube--that is a far cry from aiming at government officials (he was a government official!), and he is now essentially unemployed. He aimed at nobody. Imagine if he had aimed at somebody. That guy just may be alive today because of the First Amendment if you think about it.
The drones continue to advance, becoming infinitely more effective, deadly, and dangerous day-by-day. I, like most of us, have never seen them in action. I have only read about them, so everything "drone" remains abstract. Yet our military was designed by our musket bearing forefathers to be civilian-controlled for a reason--the military always considers action from a viability chance of survival perspective. It is never about win-win with the military. War was designed to be the last option, and only when civilians agree.
There has always been this undertone to government tyranny that involved people, you see. That is what I always heard growing up from what I would consider to be pure folks in spirit--it is embedded in my psyche. It goes something like this: Real people--our brothers and sisters in uniform. If they could just see our eyes, understand our purity, our honest intentions, we could get some of them to defect to our side, the good, civilian side. The civilians fighting for our rights side. And if not, we would at least have the means to fight with our own arms and engage them in battle. We will make the ultimate sacrifice to defend our beliefs. That is why we need these guns. End. Of. Story.
So when the drones arrive, they will be nothing like what we thought. They will have become so advanced that no person necessarily controls them. It was no longer desirable to have humans use drones to kill other humans. Instead, we developed programs that are so unbelievably advanced. Individual genetic codes of people could now be identified, and the drones can lock onto one person at a time, eliminating them with extreme precision--with no humans pushing kill buttons on the other end.
The plastics used on the drones became so strong that military-caliber machine guns could not penetrate their outer shells, round after round bouncing back to Earth. A 12 gauge shotgun may be the most effective home defense weapon for many reasons, but it cannot shoot 1000 feet or 10,000 feet into the air where the drones hover. The effective range of a choked shotgun is what, maybe 50 yards?
All of the Second Amendment-protected weaponry in the world is being rendered obsolete right now as I write this diary. We are following the footsteps of individuals who took on the English royalty and won with guns--then they wrote a guarantee to keep those guns. We have been sucked into the hole of believing that the logic of the Second Amendment as it addresses government tyranny somehow still applies in 2013--when in fact it has not for a long, long time.
We cannot stop drone development and/or deployment--I get that. But we cannot stick our heads in the sand and think that drones would never be used to stop a domestic revolution seeded in stopping government tyranny. Once those gloves come off, which I hope they never do, it is over for the guys with the hunting guns thinking they have any chance at all of stopping the government tyranny. A single burglar maybe. Government tyranny no.
This applies to everything. Everything. Nuclear weapons destroy a wide range--they are scary, but the deterrent effect of arming both sides actually works. Drones are far more sinister than nuclear weapons because they will eventually develop into extremely precise, individual target killing machines--far more effective than nuclear weapons or poison gas when it comes to eliminating specific threats since there is no collateral damage that only time can heal (days for poison gas and centuries for nuclear fallout).
So I now think of drones in a very different way, and I understand how important it is for all of us, conservative and progressive, to keep a very, very close watch on who holds the keys to the drones, their development, and their deployment. We keep a close watch on the keys to the nuclear arms--why are we dropping the ball here? It is a matter of perspective.