Bush Confiscated Guns During Katrina - Where was the outrage?

Friday, October 10, 2008


After a three-year legal battle over the unconstitutional confiscation of lawfully owned firearms during Hurricane Katrina, this week, the City of New Orleans agreed to settle a lawsuit initiated by NRA. A permanent injunction has been issued against the city, Mayor Ray Nagin, and current Police Chief Warren Riley. The Second Amendment Foundation assisted NRA in the legal battle against Mayor Ray Nagin and the City of New Orleans.

"This is an important victory for the citizens of New Orleans and the Second Amendment," said Wayne LaPierre, NRA's executive vice president. "We fought for three long years in a fundamental legal challenge to assert the inherent self-defense rights for law-abiding citizens, knowing the Constitution would prevail. Today it has prevailed and freedom has won."

Judge Carl J. Barbier presided over the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Judge Barbier signed the permanent injuncation against the City of New Orleans. The city admitted the firearm confiscations carried out by Nagin and Riley were unconstitutional and illegal.
http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Read.aspx?id=4205

The Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act of 2006 was a bill introduced in the United States Congress intended to prohibit the confiscation of legally-possessed firearms during a disaster. Its provisions became law in the form of the Vitter Amendment to the Department Of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007.

***snip***

On July 13, 2006, the Vitter Amendment passed the United States Senate 84 to 16. It was retained by the conference committee. President George W. Bush signed the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act on September 30, 2006 and it became Public Law 109-295.<4>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_Recovery_Personal_Protection_Act_of_2006

Other decisions during the antebellum period were unambiguous about the importance of race. In State v. Huntly (1843), the North Carolina Supreme Court had recognized that there was a right to carry arms guaranteed under the North Carolina Constitution, as long as such arms were carried in a manner not likely to frighten people. <12> The following year, the North Carolina Supreme Court made one of those decisions whose full significance would not appear until after the Civil War and passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. An 1840 statute provided:

That if any free negro, mulatto, or free person of color, shall wear or carry about his or her person, or keep in his or her house, any shot gun, musket, rifle, pistol, sword, dagger or bowie-knife, unless he or she shall have obtained a licence therefor from the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions of his or her county, within one year preceding the wearing, keeping or carrying therefor, he or she shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and may be indicted therefor. <13>

****snip***

The end of slavery in 1865 did not eliminate the problems of racist gun control laws; the various Black Codes adopted after the Civil War required blacks to obtain a license before carrying or possessing firearms or Bowie knives; these are sufficiently well-known that any reasonably complete history of the Reconstruction period mentions them. These restrictive gun laws played a part in the efforts of the Republicans to get the Fourteenth Amendment ratified, because it was difficult for night riders to generate the correct level of terror in a victim who was returning fire. <28> It does appear, however, that the requirement to treat blacks and whites equally before the law led to the adoption of restrictive firearms laws in the South that were equal in the letter of the law, but unequally enforced. It is clear that the vagrancy statutes adopted at roughly the same time, in 1866, were intended to be used against blacks, even though the language was race-neutral. <29>

****snip***

In much the same way, gun control has historically been a tool of racism, and associated with racist attitudes about black violence. Similarly, many gun control laws impinge on that most fundamental of rights: self-defense. Racism is so intimately tied to the history of gun control in America that we should regard gun control aimed at law-abiding people as a "suspect idea," and require that the courts use the same demanding standards when reviewing the constitutionality of a gun control law, that they would use with respect to a law that discriminated based on race.
http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html