When you say it like that, it sounds better in some ways and worse in others.

It’s like saying we need traffic police and highways before we can have cars.

These things exist now, so we’re going to need to address their use or ban them and have our country fall behind in technology and manufacturing. Other countries are making them, if we’re not building similar industries then we’re losing.

Sure, a person might have said that. They'd have been right about the danger but wrong about our risk tolerance. It's hard enough to keep people from becoming water balloons in a simple collision on the ground (though things have definitely improved in that regard over the past century). It's also a much bigger problem to run out of fuel or have an engine failure in midair than on the ground in the vast majority of situations.