Single-Click Double-Tap Murder
Single-Click Double-Tap Murder
Gun control is on many minds this week, but let’s not talk about guns. Let’s talk about drones. (With a reported 300 million guns in private hands in America already, it’s probably too late for gun control anyhow.) Drones are to nation-states what assault rifles are to psychotic mass murderers. Worse yet, the way things are going, it’s only a matter of time until alpha insurgencies like Hezbollah and the Zetas have their own fleets of armed or kamikaze drones.
The sound-bite anti-gun-control argument is, of course, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The counterargument is, “Yeah, but guns sure make it a whole lot easier.” The same applies to drone warfare. It’s suddenly so much easier to pull the trigger, and you’re not putting any of your own people at risk. And so more people die.
But surely sober, thoughtful, serious people make these decisions, you may say, aided by the fabled disposition matrix. If so, there are a few points you need to keep in mind:
1. If you think drone warfare is going to stay limited to the relatively checked-and-balanced trigger fingers of the U.S. military, you are living in one of the more astoundingly deluded dreamlands of recent times. China has its own deadly military drones already — oh, and it’s selling them to pretty much all comers.