Thought experiments are useful, but the post you were replying to was essentially saying "show me the data," and no real data were shown.

And yet, you eat food prepared by others, take buses, play sports, swim, step foot on a boat, cross streets.

(I am only guessing you do these things, most people do)

ALL of these are where people die if mistakes happen.

It just comes down to risks.

Again, I actually think that a licencing situation for larger drones would be a good idea, I think bans near airports is good. I just hate some of the arguments people use to get there.

I'm curious if you've flown a modern consumer drone recently? Something like a Phantom or a Mavic.

I have and I would trust a reasonably intelligent person who is into the hobby to handle them with care and educate themselves on the proper regulation and procedures (and other details like caring for LiPO batteries). I don't know if I'd trust the average person with the hobby.

I'm not claiming that we need extremely strict regulation, but I can see why people would want to over-index on more regulation.

I've seen people here compare drones to boats, cars, etc. I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency.

Mistakes happen all the time with drones yet no one has died. RC helicopters? They have definitely killed people, but no one is concerned about those...

The FAA is interested because the MSM news published so many salacious articles about how big bad and scary drones were and those stories got clicks.

Drones were/are new and budding technology and they can be somewhat autonomous which scares the public. People’s lack of understanding about the programming and the sensors used coupled with the addition of a camera made this yet another very a un-newsworthy clickbait scandal.

I used to build program and fly high powered drones but the media made the political environment nearly intolerable. Between the public’s reaction and the politician’s growing interest, I stopped building and flying.

As a sidenote, when I was a kid I flew “large” 5’ rockets. They used slow burn explosives to produce fire. Now there is the potential for some real damage. No one cared

the FAA has been intensely interested and collaborative with the drone industry for YEARS. since 2015 at least when I saw people from the FAA at commercial drone conferences talking about the importance of how drones would be operated safely. They first had commercial exemptions in section 333 and then formally passed Part 107 in order to address the needs of commercial operators in 2016. To say that the FAA is "only interested because of the mainstream media" is pretty inaccurate. they've been interested for YEARS.

You tell me this like it’s news. I had individual FAA drone permits in 2016. I was following developments closely it was a little before then that the public started to freak out with all the news coverage of mostly a few phantom owners doing stupid things. Yes this was a MSM created event starting back in 2014 and FAAs concern grew from that. There were loud public demands for the FAA to regulate drones based on fears one would collide with a plane. Those fears were created and nurtured by the MSM

You made a fake argument just to prove a point irrelevant to what anyone was saying? Nobody said that semi-unlikely implied it won't happen...