Great news, everyone! Police in North Dakota are now authorized to use drones armed with tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets, and other unnamed ‘non-lethal’ weapons on you!

Great news, everyone! Police in North Dakota are now authorized to use drones armed with tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets, and other unnamed ‘non-lethal’ weapons on you! Ostensibly, this is because blaming a malfunctioning drone for the fatal tasering of an unarmed citizen is a lot easier than blaming your fellow policemen or yourself.

You have Congress, where the most basic ideas go to become stillborn-versions of themselves, to thank for this. They recently passed House Bill 1328, which allows for the use of weaponized drones in North Dakota.

That's weird, isn't it? Flying mace machines? But what’s even more weird is why these drones, whose purpose is listed as "aerial surveillance" in the bill, need to be equipped with anything beyond cameras in the first place. Last time we checked, rubber bullets and tear gas don't really help passive surveillance … but they do create a state of terror and chaos. Opening the floodgates on domestic cop-drones is one thing, upgrading to the premium death-rage package with guns, tasers and debilitating aerosols is another.

And even though these police drones equipped with 'non-lethal' weapons that theoretically shouldn't harm you, the term ‘non-lethal’ is still up for broad interpretation. Regardless of semantics, ‘non-lethal’ weapons still rank second only to ‘lethal’ weapons at killing people. According to a recent report, in the US from 2001-2013 over 500 people were killed by stun guns alone. Not to mention the countless maiming incidents which results from rubber-bullets and beanbag projectiles every year.

Coming on the heels of the recent wave of death-by-cop incidents, the public at large is feeling a little apprehensive about giving a police force a flying fleet of remote-controlled ‘almost-deadly’ toys without any real legal oversight or protocols in place to keep them from harming people.

None of the flying gunslingers have been released for use at this time, but the bill lays the groundwork for a much larger problem, posing more questions than answers.

Currently, the Federal Aviation Administration is still trying to figure out basic regulations for basic civilian drones in the public airspace, let alone jurisdiction ethics and protocol procedures for individual police departments. The Washington-based think-tank, the Brookings Institute, recently stated that as of right now, it’s "the Wild West for drones in the US." You can almost hear the tumbleweeds and boot spurs.

See you at high-noon, Judge Dredd death-copters.