“Before I started building and flying model aircraft, about 20 years ago, I was headed down a pretty bad path. I was involved in drugs, theft, vandalism, and was an all around angry/violent teen. I got involved in this hobby when a friend invited me out to a flying field to teach me how to fly his RC airplane – I was hooked. I started working hard to buy my first RC helicopter kit. The time spent working to earn the money and build the kit correctly effectively removed me from a bad group of friends. They began to reject me as a “nerd” because I wasn’t hanging out as much and refused to spend my helicopter money on drugs and alcohol. Instead, I was embraced by a much more productive and well adjusted group of people in the RC hobby, which led to a job in a local hobby shop. My concern is that these new regulations will not only make criminals out of normally law abiding citizens who just want to continue the hobby in the cautious yet casual way that they always have practiced it, but that the additional fees, personal information gathering, and proprietary nature of this new equipment will repel others from the hobby in general – as it has the potential to change it (dumb it down) entirely. I am all for an online competency quiz – that’s something I would like to try myself simply for concern that maybe I don’t know something about this that would be beneficial. Maybe a card with a confirmation number showing that I passed the quiz in case some paranoid citizen calls the police because I’m flying a “drone” and “spying on them” – but I believe you should ultimately leave us alone and consider diverting this effort towards the private airplanes that seem to crash into neighborhoods and freeways around where I live on a disturbingly regular basis.”