This isn't the first video we've seen of a firearm attached to a consumer-grade drone, but it is the most convincing. The 14-second clip, uploaded to YouTube last Friday, claims to show a "homemade multirotor with a semiautomatic handgun mounted on it." The drone fires four times, with the recoil from each shot pushing it backwards in the air. If the footage is real, then the craft is certainly illegal — at least from the perspective of the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), which regulates aircraft and drones.

"We currently have rules in the books that deal with releasing anything from an aircraft, period," said FAA drone regulator Jim Williams back in 2013. "Those rules are in place, and that would prohibit weapons from being installed on a civil aircraft."

"[FAA rules] prohibit weapons from being installed on a civil aircraft."

This hasn't stopped people from playing around with the concept. After all, you can buy drones and you can buy guns; it only takes a small amount of technical know-how to join the two together. In 2013, for example, a clip appearing to show an octocopter with a Colt 45 handgun shooting various objects including a smartphone went viral. While the video was clearly a marketing stunt to sell screen protectors, it wasn't obvious whether the drone itself was actually firing the gun, or whether clever editing and blank cartridges had been used to make it appear this way.

Howgwit, the YouTube user who uploaded the recent 14-second clip, also references another video showing a CGI quadcopter with a mounted machine gun on his Google+ account, commenting: "Too bad it's fake... though I have a real one in my channel﻿." Hogwit appears to be Austin Haughwout, a US drone hobbyist who was involved in a drone-rage incident last year. While flying a video-equipped drone at a beach, Haughwout got into a confrontation with a woman, Andrea Mears, who felt she was in danger from the craft. Footage of the incident went viral, and Mears was charged with third-degree assault before being granted probation.

But while the FAA certainly doesn't want people mounting guns on quadcopters, there's no reason that people might try to claim this activity as their right. Does the Second Amendment apply to drones with guns? Legal scholars have already investigated similar claims covering robotic weapons, for example, with one law clerk, Dan Terzian, suggesting in a 2012 paper "The Right to Bear (Robotic) Arms" that there is a "very real possibility of robots being [defined as] arms under current Second Amendment doctrine." Presumably the same interpretation might also cover drones.

Update: Both the FAA and local authorities have so far concluded that Haughwout broke no laws, although a federal investigation is still ongoing.