I wonder if those people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina got their guns back.
If I remember right some did some didn't.
2015 article, quote:
This much is true: Among the flailing, ineffective, often extrajudicial responses New Orleans authorities mounted after Katrina’s landfall, one was to attempt to keep guns, legal or otherwise, off the streets. It started as disorder spread two days after the hurricane slammed Louisiana, when
an AP reporter witnessed police asking fleeing residents “to give up any guns they had before they boarded buses and trucks because police desperately needed the firepower.”
A week later, New Orleans police superintendent Edwin P. Compass III earned infamy with a widely publicized call for blanket confiscation. “Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons,” he
decreed, a policy formed and carried out incompetently, with little regard for legal implications in the storm-blown leadership vacuum.
Brannon LeBouef, a shooting instructor and security consultant, was a New Orleans Marine veteran and reserve police officer who participated in the storm response.
LeBouef’s recollections track with New Orleans police records. Shortly after the storm, the NRA and other gun groups sued the city police department, eventually
reaching a court-brokered settlement that required the police to return confiscated guns to their rightful owners. The department revealed it had taken
552 guns into custody.
Gordon Hutchinson, part of the legal team that tried to inventory the confiscated weapons,
estimated that police had collected several thousand more guns before
a federal court halted the seizures on September 23. But whether by theft or incompetence, most weapons — the more desirable and valuable ones — had never made it into the department’s coffers;
the 552 that remained to be claimed by their owners were mostly inoperable junk guns. Either way, in a city of nearly half a million, where gun possession had always been popular (and exploded after the storm), that doesn’t amount to a totalitarian power grab.
...it’s vital to “look at what really happened and attempt to view the incidents in context.” The context suggests that Katrina was an outlier in myriad ways. Hutchinson
has gathered scads of stories from gun owners alleging that
even before Katrina, they had had their legal guns taken, usually without receipts or records, by New Orleans police in routine stops — a practice one attorney called “armed robbery by cop.”
It was part of a pattern of corruption and violation of civil rights by police that the U.S. Justice Department cited in a blistering 2011 report on breakdowns that led to law enforcement’s uneven response during Katrina. “For too long, the [New Orleans police] department has been largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its officers,” that report concluded. For all the excesses attributed to law enforcement in recent years, few agencies could have been as blasé about violating citizens’ Second, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights as New Orleans was before and during the floods.
Ad hoc gun seizures are also unlikely to happen there, or anywhere else, again. On the heels of that DOJ investigation, the city’s police department
made sweeping reforms.
President Bush signed bipartisan legislation “to prohibit the confiscation of a firearm during an emergency or major disaster,” except temporarily “as a condition for entry into any mode of transportation used for rescue or evacuation.”
‘If I remember right...’ & ‘I wonder...’
Truly only serves to propagate biased mis-information, gossip as the term is called ~ doesn’t it?