Pistols and rifles, not birdshot? RPGs? What a complete joke. If you put these morons in charge of hunting birds they'd probably conclude that shooting birds doesn't work either. Try hunting birds with pistols and rifles and you'll have the same result.

Meanwhile in Kentucky: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/judge-rules-in-f...

Meanwhile in Virginia: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/65-year-old-woma...

Meanwhile in Tennessee: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/man-takes-drone-...

And for the unaware, birdshot solves the "what goes up must come down" problem; the shot is light enough that when it falls back down the air resistance has slowed it to a harmless speed. In other words, the terminal velocity is MUCH lower than the muzzle velocity. Getting hit by falling birdshot doesn't bruise, let alone kill. If somebody were serious about solving this problem, instead of just trying to justify impotent anti-drone legislation (that won't stop bad actors from throwing together rc quads from scratch) they'd ask gunsmiths to create for them a fully automatic shotgun tuned to cycle with birdshot, with a large magazine capacity, and create radar systems that can distinguish between birds and drones (probably with a human in the loop.) Anti-drone micro-CIWS.

Other promising solutions include anti-drone falcons (potentially hazardous to the bird, I've seen what those props can do to human fingers...) and hunter-killer drones piloted by superior pilots. A good defense would be a defense in depth, adopt as many of these systems as is economical. Considering the economic harm that shutting down a major airport can cause, the budget should be large.

I think you might be underestimating the problem. Airports are generally spread across huge areas (square miles/km i.e. one or more football fields) and birdshot from shotguns has an effective maximum range of about 250 meters (according to various websites and charts), therefore you'd need a ton (hundreds?) of these micro-CIWS devices scattered around the perimeter to have any fighting chance. Also you want to make sure you don't hit any airplanes or helicopters already in the air. I can imagine certification from various government agencies in any country would take several years at best.

Furthermore, imagine you have your dream-drone-killer... how do you even find them? Neither of these recent sightings were even verified to be drones, they just received reports of sightings, therefore initially they would need to deploy devices to find/verify them. Once spotted, it wouldn't be hard to send a couple trained shooters with shotguns loaded with birdshot, assuming knowing their location isn't already enough to find the pilots...

I had in mind birdshot CIWS mounted on top of a truck that could tear ass around the airport. Even if you could only place one or two in a fixed location, putting them next to tempting targets for invading drones looking to taunt the airport, such as the control tower, would probably work pretty well. Consider that the invading drone will only succeed in shutting down the airport if somebody notices it; somebody trying to commit economic sabotage will be making the presence of their drone known. If the invading drone goes unnoticed, then it will fail to accomplish it's mission.

As for drones flying too high, that is a problem but one that could be addressed (not solved) by using interceptor drones to spook or bait the invading drone into flying lower. On a non-ballistic sidenote, you could also have race quads configured to rapidly triangulate the origin control signal and collect video evidence of the signal origin. Not fool-proof by any means, but I wager that would be enough to catch all but the most clever/dedicated attackers.

This all seems a bit silly, but if you throw enough money at it I think you can make it work. The question is how much economic harm can a drone do by shutting down an international airport and how much money are you willing to spend to prevent this. My main point here is that the situation isn't nearly as hopeless as a bunch of soldiers taking potshots at the drones with their rifles (that's pretty much guaranteed to be not work and is exceptionally dangerous.)

Drones could easily fly in above the effective ceiling for birdshot anyway. A drone at 500m will easily interfere with flight paths and is well above the range of shotguns.