Shooting Them Down

Interesting stuff, this (via Insty):

I Have Seen the Future of Anti-Drone Warfare, and It’s Dirt-Cheap

I vaguely remembered reading something about the Sting a year or more ago, but I just learned today that they’re both dirt-cheap and extremely effective — mostly at shooting down Russia’s Geran-2 one-way attack drones, which are licensed copies of Iran’s Shahed that have caused us considerable trouble in Operation Epic Fury.

Ukraine needs tons of these things, because Geran is essentially a terror weapon aimed in large numbers — currently 100 to 200 per attack — at Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. Larger attack waves include anything from 300 up to just over 800 Geran-2s in one night.

So the concept behind Sting is simply enough: Make something cheap and fast to build, easy to use, yet still capable of knocking a Geran-2 out of the sky far enough out from its target for some degree of safety.

And the Ukrainians did just that.

Of course, that’s all well and good in a military context, and our own .dotmil needs to hop onto this with all due dispatch, if they haven’t done so already.  (I assume they have, but whatever.)

What interests me as a civilian, however, is a solution closer to home [sic], in that these little airborne nuisances can also be used by anti-social elements to both spy on people and, in the worst case, to kamikaze themselves into a target — such as, for instance, your home or similar.  Why go to all the trouble of kitting yourself up with a suicide explosive vest or a rifle in order to inflict death and damage on (say) a church or synagogue, when you can essentially outsource the suicide bit to something you hand-built in your garage?

And in the above scenario, how would ordinary people — say, adherents of the Second Amendment — defend themselves or their communities against such nefarious electro-mechanical mosquitoes?

I’m thinking of something like this, of course:

That’s the semi-auto 12ga Browning Silver Hunter (and of course there are less-expensive options because America).  This differs from your standard home defense shotgun, say a 12ga Mossberg Maverick 88:

…in that the Hunter is not a pump action device but semi-auto (ergo  a higher rate of fire) and it has a much longer barrel (ergo  much greater accuracy at distance, ask any bird shooter).

I’m interested in this concept because it raises a couple of practical issues such as the type of ammo that would work best to bring down a drone (00 buck, or perhaps something lighter?).  Obviously, a 12ga slug would end the flight path of a drone with spectacular effect, but it has to be accurate:  far easier to spread the terminal effect with shot… but which shot?  00 buckshot is excellent, but it also kicks like hell — and getting followup blasts off quickly with said semi-auto action means a quicker target re-acquisition time is necessary.  Would 7/8 birdshot do the trick as well?  For that matter, would a 20ga shotgun be as effective as a 12ga under such circumstances?  (Almost all semi-auto shotguns are offered in both chamberings.)

I’ve owned a 20ga semi-auto shotgun in the past, and I have to say that the effect downrange is almost as effective as a 12ga (if those watermelons and milk jugs are at all indicative), but the recoil was far less problematic.

Of course I think that the Silver Hunter is just dreamy, in so many ways:

…and yes, the addition of a red-dot sighting device may certainly be of assistance (even though I think it spoils the look of the gun).

Feel free to discuss this topic in Comments, of course.