In Legal Insurrection, we covered the story of one Colorado town’s plans to shoot down drones over its airspace.

Now, the concept has gone international and University of Arkansas student T.J Stallbaumer analyses the developments:

Last week, the Japanese made quite an announcement: They will begin shooting down foreign drones that enter their airspace. This announcement came after a Chinese drone entered their airspace, and essentially just hung out for a while. The Japanese were very upset by this, as you might imagine due to the issuance of such a pledge.

As with anything that happens in the entire world, America has a dog in this fight. One may say that we have multiple dogs in this fight. America is like the Michael Vick of worldwide problems. We have a dog in every fight, and when the media gets wind of it, things are sure to get interesting. It’s an apt metaphor indeed.

If you haven’t watched the news for a couple years, it may be tricky to follow my line of reasoning. Let me catch you up in one sentence: Drones are a big deal, and they raise a new question in the “ethics” of warfare—with the Obama Administration receiving widespread criticism for drone attacks, we have to wonder whether these unmanned planes are the future of war.

In the case of China versus Japan, we have quite an issue. Our relations with Japan are quite good, according to The New York Times. However, as most of us know, we owe China some unfathomable amount of money. Will the U.S. have anything to say about this drone-related standoff? Probably. Should we? Probably not.

At the end of the day, I think this whole entire argument boils down to a question of ethics. How will unmanned planes affect the future of warfare, and should there be a line as to how we use them? America probably doesn’t think so, but that’s coming from the country that bugs the phone lines of German prime ministers, so spy planes probably don’t seem to be such a concern.

If you ask me, the argument needs to hinge on the state of the civilians. One argument regularly made against the use of drones in warfare is the ease of use. This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but it implies something different than the fact that they are literally easy to use. They aren’t. But, some say, they’re easier to kill with. It’s easy to pull the trigger from a comfy chair inside of your base, but it must be harder on the ground. I think that if drone attacks start killing civilians (more than they already do) then we have a really serious problem.