I was tired when I wrote that last night and it doesn't explain my point of view well, so let me give you a more considered reply.

Firstly, the inevitability of the disaster is not at all obvious. Drone attacks don't scale in anything like the same way nukes do. Nor do kinetic attacks have the same long-term environmental hangover that nukes and chemical weapons do. Drone swarms are a potentially deadly problem for military elements and potentially political organs, but they excel at narrowly targeted objectives. They're not on the same level of existential risk to entire cities, unless we get into skynet territory with wholly autonomous factories and logistic chains.

What I'm saying is naive is the belief in technical (legal) methods. You write: Bans and controls are effective at limiting quantity but this is clearly not the case. Small arms trafficking is actually widespread despite all the hand-wringing, and efforts at gun control in the US are token at best.

They're ineffective partly because they are asinine and pursued in a childish fashion. Gun control as a policy objective is wholly reasonable, and I can give numerous arguments on its behalf. But in the US, the legal environment is ruled by the 2nd Amendment, whose language about how 'the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' is so plain as to be inarguable. Gun control proponents really won't make any serious headway for the foreseeable future unless they try to repeal or rewrite this. None of them want to do that because it's a political non-starter. (Incidentally, this is not an argument for just giving up on the problem; a small tax on the sale of ammunition, with all revenue reserved for the medical or funeral expenses of shooting victims, is both politically and legally feasible imho).

My argument is not only about quantity, but versatility. I mentioned how easy it is to manufacture weapons. The sad reality is that if you could wave a magic wand and make all guns in the USA vanish immediately (or just privately held guns if you enjoy being pushed around by people in uniform), in a month's time you would have a gun problem again. It would be on a smaller scale - at first. But it wouldn't stay that way. It's costly to manufacture a really well-engineered gun, of course, but it's very very easy to manufacture a crappy gun that's Good Enough. You don't need a fancy workshop or a degree in mechanical engineering, as the Abe assassination showed. If you have some mechanical aptitude or admit the use of cheap and easily available tools, the emerging insurgency in Myanmar is making extensive use of 3d printed guns.

A less spectacular but increasingly widespread use of 3d printing is the manufacture of auto sears, a mechanical part that swapped into the trigger mechanism of a semi-automatic gun to allow fully automatic fire. It's really simple, just a lever with a particular shape about the size of your index finger. They're trivially easy to make and very easy to apply. The ATF charges people for selling them quite frequently, but let's be realistic: they are only finding the suckers who are so stupid/greedy that they advertise more or less openly. This is not such a huge problem in my view because most people who want to use one of these are into the novelty factor of shooting a high powered weapon for kicks. But you'd be foolish to assume that they're not proliferating wildly in certain circles just because of a few prosecutions.

Just as very basic hardware can be repurposed toward weapon manufacture, any computer with a network connection is theoretically a cyberattack vector. It doesn't have to be a super-clever or advanced cyberattack; you can trade off quality against quantity if you are just basically competent in python or shell scripting, and you can even get results with crude readymade tools like Low Orbit Ion Cannon.

So it is with drones. Weaponizing them is trivial; payloads don't need to be huge and the same technology that can save a life by dropping medical supplies can end one by dropping a hand grenade (both of these techniques are being used in Ukraine on a daily basis). Computer vision, maneuver, obstacle avoidance, communications etc. etc. can all enhance the capability of a drone swarm, but all those things have valid purposes too. Like a piece of steel tubing or a Raspberry Pi with Linux installed, it's not the device itself that's the problem but the purpose for which it is configured.

So I think it's childish to think you can legislate away drone swarming, the same way it's childish to think you can just legislate small arms or cyberattacks or drugs or protests out of existence. In the end, legislative solutions are just about making a really nasty example out of the few people you catch doing a Bad Thing and then hoping it scares everyone else into compliance. Once you lose legitimacy or people decide they don't care that much any more, it's useless. I'm emphasizing 'people' here because drone technology is so simple and accessible that it's not limited to nation states or large industrial concerns. Any garage could be a drone lab, any pickup truck can be a launchpad.