Adding that he was careful to only shoot directly into the air, Merideth said he was quickly confronted by the drone’s owners.
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The charters states that drones fitted with cameras should not be flown within 50m of people, vehicles, buildings or structures.
Kentucky police charged a man on Sunday for shooting down a drone that was flying over his home. “What in the world are they looking for?” she asked.
She wasn’t the only one on the block concerned about the tiny unmanned aircraft.
A father of two young girls didn’t take too kindly to a camera-equipped quadrocopter hovering over his family’s home – so he blasted it out of the sky. ‘I went and got my shotgun and I said, ‘I’m not going to do anything unless it’s directly over my property.’. The man grabbed his shotgun and waited to see if the drone would fly over his backyard property.
“They had it low enough that he hit it”, Diebold said. “We were in our own yard”.
So are there rules for drones? “They were pretty irate”, Merideth said.
Hillview police said they understand Merideth’s concern about his privacy but they are sticking with the charges of wanton endangerment and criminal mischief. I also can’t abide by how he handled the ensuing encounter, in which he admits to threatening to shoot the four men (which seems a bit excessive) who showed up to inquire about the drone in question if they stepped foot on his property. It is against the law to discharge a firearm, within city limits, according to a Hillview ordinance, unless you are a law enforcement officer or the action is in self defense.
‘Within a minute or so, here it came, ‘ he said. “We don’t know if he was looking at the girls…To me, it was the same as trespassing”.
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Merideth stands behind his actions and he’s not alone. “The people that own the drones and the people that hate guns are the only ones that disagree with what I did”, he said. ‘If he had been moving and just kept moving, that would have been one thing – but when he come directly over our heads, and just hovered there, I felt like I had the right.’. He is due back in court in September. The owner of the drone claimed he was flying it to get pictures of a friend’s house and that the device cost $1,800.
