Hurricane Katrina

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	No one will be able to be armed. Guns will be taken. Only law enforcement will be allowed to have guns.
— New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass

While a meteorological occurrence may seem an odd subject for inclusion in an encyclopedia dedicated to firearm topics, Hurricane Katrina is being included explicitly for the occurrence of the unlawful confiscation of firearms which occurred in the aftermath.

The order

The incidents in question began following a September 8 city-wide order by New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass, at the behest of Mayor Ray Nagin, to local police, National Guard troops, and US Marshals to confiscate all civilian-held firearms. "No one will be able to be armed," Compass said. "Guns will be taken. Only law enforcement will be allowed to have guns." Seizures were carried out without warrant, and in some cases with excessive force.

Patricia Konie

One particularly infamous instance — which was captured on film and can be seen in the second video of the slideshow — involved 58 year old New Orleans resident Patricia Konie. Konie had stayed behind, in her well provisioned home, and had an old revolver for protection. A group of police entered the house, and when she refused to surrender her revolver, she was tackled and it was removed by force. Konie's shoulder was fractured, and she was taken into police custody for failing to surrender her firearm. Even National Guard troops, armed with assault rifles, were used for house to house searches, seizing firearms and attempting to force those remaining in the city to abandon their homes.

Reactions

Angered citizens, backed by the National Rifle Association and other organizations, filed protests over the constitutionality of such an order and the difficulty in tracking seizures, as paperwork was rarely filed during the searches. Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, defended the right of affected citizens to retain firearms, saying that, "What we’ve seen in Louisiana - the breakdown of law and order in the aftermath of disaster - is exactly the kind of situation where the Second Amendment was intended to allow citizens to protect themselves."

Media silence

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the searches received little news coverage by mainstream media. Both ABC (see slideshow video#3) and (somewhat surprisingly) Fox News were quite limited in their coverage and CNN even tried to claim that Patricia Konie was the aggressor in her incident, despite raw footage of the incident showing that she did NOT point a gun at anyone. This despite the fact that reaction from groups such as the NRA, the Second Amendment Foundation, and Gun Owners of America was immediate and outraged, and a lawsuit was filed September 22 by the NRA and SAF on behalf of two firearm owners whose firearms were seized. On September 23, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana issued a restraining order to bar further firearms confiscations.

Withholding guns

After refusing for months to admit that it had any seized firearms, the city revealed in mid-March that it did have a cache of over 1000 firearms seized after the hurricane. This disclosure came only after the NRA had filed a motion in court to hold the city in contempt for failure to comply with the U.S. District Court's earlier order to return all seized firearms. On April 14, 2006, it was announced that the city will begin to return seized firearms. As of early 2008, however, many firearms were still in police possession, and the matter was still in court. The matter was finally settled in favor of the NRA in October of 2008.

Per the agreement, the city was required to relax the unrealistically strict proof of ownership requirements which had previously been used, and was to release firearms to their owners with only an affidavit claiming ownership and a background check to verify that the owner is legally able to possess a firearm.

Since the government seemingly needed to actually have it spelled out in black and white for them, Louisiana legislator Steve Scalise introduced Louisiana House Bill 760, which would prohibit confiscation of firearms in a state of emergency (as some military personnel had refused to do - see video#4), unless the seizure is pursuant to the investigation of a crime, or if the seizure is necessary to prevent immediate harm to the officer or another individual. On June 8, 2006, HB 760 was signed into law. 21 other states joined Louisiana in enacting similar laws. A federal law prohibiting seizure of lawfully held firearms during an emergency, the Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act of 2006, passed in the House with a vote of 322 to 99, and in the Senate by 84-16. The bill was signed into law by President Bush on October 9, 2006.