"Worse yet, the way things are going, it’s only a matter of time until alpha insurgencies like Hezbollah and the Zetas have their own fleets of armed or kamikaze drones."
And who will make and sell them those drones? Probably the same companies that are selling them to the US Army today. The way things are going right now, I envision warfare in the future being much like in the Terminator Salvation movie. The only difference is that the "machines" might not be self-aware (although they could be automatic), but they will be controlled by other humans. But in places where the war will actually happen, all you'll see is a battle between machines and men being slaughtered by them.
Also, drones aren't nuclear science. Any number can play. the Iranians may or may not be making useful drones now ( http://theaviationist.com/2012/01/30/iran-a1/ ), to give some idea.
I'd guess that the enabling parts that didn't exist 20 years ago are today found in mass-market cellphones, so controlling the technology as if it was big uranium-enriching plants is not going to happen.
From Wikipedia (Al Qassam rockets): "The cost of the materials used for manufacturing each Qassam is up to $800 or €500"
I'm sure the cost of building a drone with decent carrying capacity will come within that range pretty soon. Hell, with the average Qassam's precision, does it even matter if it costs 4x if your hit rate increases?
Steal a tacocopter and stick a granade under it -- that should enable you to take out the target (and leave a pretty decent mystery for the local authorities to solve. How do you prove who flew the plane? Who fixed the handgranade?).
I don't think it's that simple. For starters, there's probably a very short list of people who own tacocopters, let alone people who own grenades.
If it becomes a problem, I can think of countermeasures -- register the things, ban them in public spaces/require flight plans, detect and triangulate the control signal. Heck, you could just look around; with a low tech system like that, whoever's flying the thing needs line of sight to it in order to identify the target. It's noisy and slow and I'd expect not nearly as effective as stealing a car and doing a drive-by shooting.
But more than that, I'd be very surprised if that sort of thing becomes a problem. Normal people aren't murderers. Think about all the poisons, explosives, and highly kinetic pieces of equipment normal people have access to right now.
Getting a grenade is pretty easy, and I meant stealing the tacopter to get around the flightplan issue you can order him the taco using a stolen credit card, the intercept it using a butterfly net.
And who will make and sell them those drones? Probably the same companies that are selling them to the US Army today. The way things are going right now, I envision warfare in the future being much like in the Terminator Salvation movie. The only difference is that the "machines" might not be self-aware (although they could be automatic), but they will be controlled by other humans. But in places where the war will actually happen, all you'll see is a battle between machines and men being slaughtered by them.