It's exactly like Russian Roulette except instead of the cylinder having six positions with one bullet it'll be something on the order of 20 million positions with one bullet. You have to look at it from this perspective and not from the media perspective. If something is possible then it has some probability of occurring. The probability may not be great but given enough time it is probable it will occur. Now some socially challenged youth decides it would be fun to point a laser at a low flying airplane. You have two conditions when the laser hits the airplane, either it continues to fly or it crashes. Those are the only two possible outcomes. Now the pilot may get a face full of laser light and panic and crash the low flying plane. That would be a direct effect of the laser. The issue here is the youth has no idea how the pilots may react. It could be no reaction at all with the pilots saying something to the effect of, "oooh look at the pretty green light.", all the way to freaking and crashing the plane. It is out of the youths control. If you don't think someone will see the beam in the sky and report that to the police and news you are crazy.
The second possibility is that the youth points the laser at the low flying plane and the plane has a catastrophic failure of some kind that causes it to crash. People report seeing a green laser beam in the sky.
So you have a plane that flys or a plane that crashes. If the plane crashes the media will be all over the laser end of it. We know this to be true regardless of the true reason for the accident.
The key thing to keep in mind here is that although the laser itself will have nothing to do with an aircraft accident it could begin a chain of events that end in a crash. Very few accidents are the result of a single failure. What happens is a long chain of events leading to the one single final outcome. We are looking at the probability of the probability of the probability. When it all comes together an event will occur. It is the basis of Chaos, that tiny bit of the world we can never control. Because it is possible, you can guarantee it will happen at some point. There will be an aircraft accident and there will be a nice laser beam in the sky at the same time. The mathematics do not lie. As Agent Smith once pointed out, "...that is the sound of inevitability..."
Enjoy them while you can. As long as there are stupid people with lasers in this world they will be playing Russian Roulette not only with the airplanes they lase but also with your ability to legally own them.
