israel67 wrote:
Anyway. I was shocked by the footage of the gun confiscations on the NRA site and youtube, because without exception, every citizen meekly surrendered his weapons. What happened to 'cold, dead fingers ..' ? Legally, what would have been the position of a citizen who responded with deadly force to what was in effect, unlawful seizure of his weapons? Theft.
The reality of the situation is that, if you responded with deadly force and you actually killed a police officer in the process, you would most likely be charged with murder. Whether or not you would be convicted is an open question, but the
odds are that you would. Curiously, the fact that most law abiding citizens would surrender their weapons if ordered to do so, proves the point that it is not necessary.
And what sanctions did the officials involved suffer? I read that the Senate basically changed the law to make any future such seizures illegal. Does that mean that they were legal
No, the seizures were not even remotely legal. The officers and officials involved suffered no sanctions personally, other than having their local or national reputations tarnished. In fact, they lost their legal battle and were required by the courts to return all of the confiscated weapons to their rightful owners - an order with which they have, for the most part, not yet complied. As it turns out, the place of storage they used in a flooded area resulted in many of the firearms being kept under water for an extended period of time, permanently ruining them. In those cases, neither have they compensated the rightful owners for their loss of property.
And most of all ... if a disaster such as Katrina befell the US on a wider scale ... would y'all just stand there and let the police take your weapons off you, if the President ordered it?
Most certainly not. You have to understand the local political landscape of New Orleans going into the Katrina event to understand why things turned out the way they did. Other U.S. cities have suffered major devastation from hurricanes prior to Katrina, and none of them, to the best of my recall, ever had the sociopolitical fallout that happened with Katrina. Other American cities have experienced near total devastation, and yet none of them ever experienced the complete breakdown of political leadership and social order as did New Orleans. The bottom line is that both the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans were manifestly incompetent for the positions to which they had been elected. The state and local Democratic party political machines were very powerful at the time, and they kept the masses in line with bread and circuses. You had a city population with a majority of whom depended on government for assistance "entitlements" and who were used to suckling at the government teat. They had lost the ability to think for themselves and the drive to take personal responsibility for their condition. You had a complete breakdown of social services and local government's inability to
lead was manifestly apparent. You had a number of police officers (but by no means
all of them) abandoning their posts and joining in the looting.
An example of incompetence: after Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin had meetings with President Bush on board Air Force One, on the tarmac, in which Bush made specific offers of federal aid and intervention. Blanco, instead of accepting the aid straight away, told Bush that she needed 24 hours to decide whether or not to accept it. Meanwhile, people were already dying deaths directly attributable to her inaction, looters were out of control, and social order had more or less completely broken down. At
real issue was whether Blanco, a Democrat who despised the Bush administration, ought to accept help from a Republican president she hated. Mayor Ray Nagin, a Democrat who had endorsed current Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, and who was truly in over his head as Mayor during a disaster of this magnitude, had counseled that she accept Bush's offer. The fact that Nagin, a de facto rival, was urging her to put aside partisanship and do the right thing, must have made the pill even more bitter and harder for her to swallow. Whatever her motivations (upon which it is almost impossible to cast a good light), Blanco fiddled while Rome burned. It became apparent that she had absolutely no understanding of the
Posse Comitatus Act, which, at the time, required
her to request the law enforcement assistance of the National Guard
before such assistance could be given. She tried to blame the president for inaction, when in fact, it was her own inaction which
forced his inaction.
In short, New Orleans/Katrina was a "perfect storm" (pun very much intended) - an unhappy confluence of incompetence, corruption, personal sloth, stupidity, fear, and years of disastrous liberal policies, all coming together at a moment when even an upright and sober leadership with the best interests of its people in heart would have been severely tested. New Orleans was already a preloaded cesspool of leadership incompetence, welfare entitlements, and immorality, all simmering just underneath the surface and waiting for a triggering event like Katrina to reveal it to the world.
We are nowhere near being a perfect nation, but the majority of Americans possess and display more common sense on a daily basis than was exhibited in New Orleans during Katrina. I firmly believe that a gun confiscation effort on a national scale would result in an overthrow of government, partly because it would be difficult to motivate American troops to fire on their own citizenry for the purpose of putting down such a rebellion on a national scale, and partly because the gun grabbers have made the stupid decision to disarm themselves, and are therefore in no position to enforce such a thing on the rest of us who
are armed. Also, the spectacle in New Orleans of legal gun owners being forcibly disarmed by a police force acting outside of their constitutional authority was a real wakeup call for the nation. I don't think it will happen again.
(...edited to correct a misspelling, and to add a link explaining "posse comitatus"...)
