New Orleans Finally Admit They Had Confiscated Guns
Date: Apr 6, 2006 1:31 AM
The New GUN WEEK, April 10, 2006
Page 5

New Orleans Finally Admit They Had Confiscated Guns
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor

Months of denial came to an end in New Orleans on Mar. 15
when the attorney representing the city admitted to counsel
for the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and National Rifle
Association (NRA) that the police actually did have
possession of hundreds of firearms that had been seized from
residents following Hurricane Katrina last Summer.

It took a motion for contempt, filed in federal court, to
jar the city from its long standing contention that it did
not have any firearms that had been taken from people
without warrant or probable cause in the chaos that followed
the hurricane and devastating flood. Attorneys Dan Holliday
of Baton Rouge, LA, and Stephen Halbrook of Fairfax, VA,
both told Gun Week that they were taken to a temporary
police property facility in the city, where they saw more
than 1,000 firearms. The guns were being stored in a
double-wide trailer and large van, Halbrook said.

The city’s stunning about-face came on the day that a
federal judge was about to hear arguments on the contempt
motion. SAF and NRA had earlier filed the motion because of
a failure by the city to return calls or respond to other
messages regarding the disposition of the seized firearms,
and the lawsuit seeking a permanent injunction against such
confiscations in the future.

It is still not clear who gave the original confiscation
order, and finding that out— and holding someone
accountable—is not part of the SAF/NRA legal action,
Halbrook explained. The thrust of the law suit is only to
prevent such gun seizures, and to secure the return of
confiscated firearms to their rightful owners.

To that end, the city has agreed to post notice on its
website about procedures to reclaim guns.

For Holliday, the revelation was stunning. He called the
city’s admission a “significant event.”

SAF founder Alan Gottlieb went even farther upon learning of
the stockpiled guns.

“We’re almost in disbelief,” he stated. “For months, the
city maintained it did not have any guns in its possession
that had been taken from people following the hurricane.
Now our attorneys have seen the proof that New Orleans was
less than honest with the court.

“What happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was an
outrage,” Gottlieb added. “Equally disturbing is the fact
that it apparently took a motion for contempt to force the
city to admit what it had been denying for the past five
months.”

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has turned the
New Orleans case into a campaign issue, reminding gunowners
across the country to “Remember New Orleans.”

Won’t Forget

It is not likely American gunowners will ever forget what
happened in the Crescent City after last August’s
devastating storm and breached levees. As the city
descended into chaos, police and fire services broke down,
gangs of looters roamed freely through commercial and
residential districts, and the relief effort was bound up by
red tape and politics.

Amid the anarchy, then-Police Superintendent Edwin Compass
announced that nobody would be allowed to have firearms, and
that all guns would be seized. Squads of police, including
scores of officers from all over the country who went to the
city to help restore order, also roamed the city. But in
addition to keeping the peace, they were specifically
interested in taking guns from anyone who had them.

Citizens were stopped at roadblocks, in boats on Lake
Pontchartrain, and confronted in their own homes and
disarmed, often at gunpoint and sometimes with brute force.
TV news footage of one such confiscation has become
infamous. New Orleans resident Patricia Konie was gang
tackled by members of a California Highway Patrol unit
because she refused to leave her home, which was high and
dry, and because she had an old Colt revolver.

Konie was injured in that incident and later needed surgery,
according to her attorney, Ashton O'Dwyer. She was
forcibly evacuated and her handgun has never been returned.

Alerted to the gun confiscations, SAF and NRA launched
investigations that quickly became a joint operation. For
more than a week, investigators for both groups were on the
ground in the New Orleans area while attorneys prepared a
case for the federal court. In September, Judge Jay Zainey
of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of
Louisiana issued a temporary restraining order to stop the
confiscations.

It was a landmark victory, not only for its swiftness and
because of the issue, but also because it marked a
significant cooperative effort by two of the nation’s
leading gun rights organizations. Two months later, and
just as significantly, NRA and SAF were back in court
together again, this time with support from the Law
Enforcement Alliance of America and California Firearms
Retailers Association, to overturn the San Francisco gun
ban.

About Face

From the outset, New Orleans authorities insisted they had
not confiscated anyone’s guns. This contention persisted
over five months until the surprising turnabout came in
March.

Just how many confiscated firearms the city has was not
clear. Halbrook told Gun Week that the estimate of 1,100
guns at the storage facility may not be accurate, and he
said it is possible there are more firearms at various
police substations around the city.

New Orleans is still in the recovery stage, he said. Much
of the city remains in ruins and the reconstruction effort
is facing another looming hurricane season.

What brought the reversal of stories, though, appears to
have been the motion for contempt. The administration of
Mayor Ray Nagin had not been responsive to repeated attempts
by the NRA-SAF attorneys to simply open a dialog on the
original order. The motion not only asked the court to hold
Nagin and Police Superintendent Warren Riley in contempt for
failing to comply with the temporary restraining order, but
also to require the city to return seized firearms to their
owners.

At the time the motion was filed, LaPierre issued a
statement recalling, “With looters, rapists and other thugs
running rampant in New Orleans, Ray Nagin issued an order to
disarm all law-abiding citizens. With no law enforcement
and 911 available, he left the victims vulnerable by
stripping away their only means of defending themselves and
their loved ones. Now Ray Nagin thinks he’s above the law,
and that’s just wrong.”

“If Ray Nagin and Warren Riley think this lawsuit, and the
court order, will just go away by pretending they don’t
exist, they are sadly mistaken,” Gottlieb added at the time.
“The city of New Orleans has insisted that no guns were
seized, and we know that’s not true.... Mayor Nagin seems
to be suffering from the same denial that possessed him
before the hurricane hit, and in the days afterward when he
blamed everyone else on the map for his failure of
leadership. We want Nagin and Chief Riley to appear in open
court and testify under oath why they should not be held in
contempt. They have been given every opportunity to comply
with the court order and they have done nothing. They are
not above the law.”

Facing a contempt hearing, the city suddenly acknowledged
that there were “some guns.”

Neither Halbrook nor Holliday indicated they were prepared
to learn just how many guns the city had in lockup.
Holliday said guns he examined were tagged, and it appeared
the police have been creating a database to identify the
guns and their rightful owners.

“It’s a tad bit outrageous that we’ve gone this long,”
Holliday said. “They’ve been flat out denying they had
anything and on the day of the hearing for our motion of
contempt they found out they had a bunch of guns.”

“While we are stunned at this complete reversal on the
city’s part,” Gottlieb said, “the important immediate issue
is making sure gunowners get their property back. We’re
glad that the city is going to move swiftly to make that
possible, and naturally we will do whatever is necessary to
make this happen.”