Government Still Shooting Lasers Into Sky Like Yosemite Sam Firing His Six-Shooters

Pew pew, etc., pew.

Government employees hard at work figuring out how to shoot each other.

If you are flying anywhere near the Texas-Mexico border, may we suggest not doing that? Because as best we can tell, the incompetent pus-brains currently running America through a wheat thresher have turned the airspace in that area into the battle scene from every sci-fi outer space movie ever committed to film.

On Thursday, the Defense Department, the FAA, and Customs and Border Patrol announced in a joint statement that the DoD (it will be a cold day in Satan’s asshole before we call it the Department of War) “employed counter-unmanned aircraft system authorities to mitigate a seemingly threatening unmanned aerial system operating within military airspace.”

The English translation of this bureaucratic gobbledygook is that the United States military used a laser to shoot down an object it failed to identify what turned out to be an unmanned CBP drone. This led the FAA to announce temporary flight restrictions for the area around Fort Hancock, Texas, about 50 miles from El Paso. These restrictions will last until June 24. Luckily there is not a lot of commercial flight activity around that desolate stretch of Texas, though there are likely plenty of small civilian and probably military aircraft.

Fort Hancock was previously best known as the place where Andy Dufresne crossed the border after escaping from prison in The Shawshank Redemption, so congrats to the little town on making the news again.

In their joint statement, the agencies involved also couldn’t help giving Donald Trump and themselves a tug job, writing:

At President Trump’s direction, the Department of War, FAA, and Customs and Border Patrol are working together in an unprecedented fashion to mitigate drone threats by Mexican cartels and foreign terrorist organizations at the U.S.-Mexico Border.

Unprecedented in the sense that, before Trump turned the highest levels of government into an employment program for people who otherwise can’t organize a game of Candyland, we would have trusted that the agencies involved would have been competent, sure.

But apparently no one at CBP, FAA, or DoD is aware of how telephones fucking work, because this is the second time in two weeks that lasers were blasted willy-nilly into the Texas sky. To say Democrats are alarmed might be understating the case:

“Our heads are exploding over the news that DoD reportedly shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone using a high risk counter-unmanned aircraft system,” three Democrats on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure said in a statement.

At least your heads aren’t exploding because some untrained military dimwit fired lasers at them! Try to look on the bright side.

This latest incident is not to be confused with the incident two weeks ago when the CBP used a DoD laser system to shoot down what it believed were drones flown by Mexican drug cartels. Those drones turned out to be Mylar party balloons, and the whole incident could have easily turned into the wildest ruination of a gender reveal party ever. That shootdown happened closer to El Paso and caused the FAA to shut down that city’s airport for eight hours until it could figure out what was going on, since the geniuses at CBP hadn’t bothered to tell the FAA it would be shooting off lasers near commercial aircraft.

Source: DoD training film.

See, Pete Hegseth is making the Department of Defense more efficient. Two weeks ago, they were loaning out lasers to morons who would irresponsibly fire them into the air without taking precautions or warning other government agencies (the ones in charge of all the Americans flying around the sky in civilian aircraft) that might be affected. Now the DoD is using its own in-house morons to irresponsibly fire lasers into the air without taking precautions or warning other government agencies that might be affected. Progress!

Jewish Space Lasers Shoot Down 99 Luftballons, Pete Hegseth Still Somehow Has Job

There was a time when this sort of crap would have resulted in congressional hearings, resignations, firings, and actual shame for all involved. But in this era, the Republicans in Congress will be too busy demanding Hillary Clinton tell them who else in the Swamp has been eating children’s faces in a secret basement under a random pizza joint to do anything that might be useful and save lives. Or at least not be so goddamn embarrassing for everyone involved.

In their statement, the three Democratic members of Congress noted that they have complained for months about the White House not adequately training operators of these C-UAS, or counter unmanned aerial systems. They have also been warning about a huge lack of coordination between various agencies that keeps resulting in these incidents and will probably keep resulting in them until someone gets killed.

Unless that someone is aboard a deportation flight that gets knocked out of the sky by one of these lasers, in which case the White House will probably throw out a hearty attaboy and a couple of medals.

[CNN / WaPo]

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