[BuyMyBitcoins]

The use of a drone also ups the ante from a prosecutor’s perspective. Charging a vandal caught with a paintbrush and a ladder is nothing out of the ordinary. A routine misdemeanor.

Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.

[AngryData]

Yeah like we gotta be serious here, US cops and courts are out to screw people over because that is how they increase their budget, pay, and bonuses. If they think they can twist some law into giving you a felony, they will, regardless of the spirit of the law.

Attaching any kind of potential weapon on a drone has no real precedent so they can dig through 19th century law and combine it with some 21st century law and punishment and screw your life over with bull crap unless you got $100K+ sitting around to throw on a good lawyer. The risk of being caught may be a bit lower, but the potential punishment if caught could be absolutely enormous.

[kotaKat]

Plus now you're technically arming an aircraft with something, and that might piss off the feds a little bit.

[rationalist]

Also, you are dropping something from the aircraft which is a different violation (even if it is moving at 100m/s horizontally while falling at 9.8m/s²).