SAF-NRA Lawsuit Halts NO Gun Grab
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
The National Rifle Association (NRA) and Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) marched into federal court last month in Baton Rouge, LA, and came out with a stunning victory that put a stop to gun confiscations by police and National Guard units brought in to restore order to New Orleans and surrounding parishes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
A lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana successfully won a temporary restraining order (TRO), signed by Judge Jay Zainey. The order required an end to the seizures, and also the prompt return of confiscated firearms.
The victory came as a prelude to the 20th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC) in Los Angeles—coverage of which will begin in the Oct. 20 Gun Week—and dominated discussions there.
SAF founder Alan Gottlieb called the judge’s order “a great victory, not just for the NRA and SAF, but primarily for law-abiding gunowners everywhere.”
“We are proud to have joined forces with the NRA to put an end to what has amounted to a warrantless gun grab by authorities in New Orleans and surrounding jurisdictions,” Gottlieb said.
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre told Gun Week that the decision “sends a strong signal that if anybody dares confiscation, they will find themselves in court.”
LaPierre was visibly angry about the gun seizures.
“For the first time in America, peaceable citizens who were trying to protect themselves from looters, were disarmed at gun point,” he stressed.
He accused New Orleans authorities of “participating in the theft of property.”
Gun Week learned that almost immediately after Zainey issued the TRO, the sheriff in St. Tammany Parish announced he would return all confiscated guns. Firearms were reportedly returned to Buell O. Teel, one of the individual plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Gunowners across the nation became furious when police—many of them from outside jurisdictions who had come to the Crescent City to help restore order—and National Guardsmen began confiscating guns after New Orleans Police Chief P. Edwin Compass III told reporters, “Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons,” and ABC News quoted Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley stating, “No one will be able to be armed. We are going to take all the weapons.”
In court documents, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Compass and another defendant, St. Tammany Sheriff Jack Strain, denied they had ordered the firearms seizures. However, statements by Compass and Riley were enough to counter that claim.
When word got out from the New Orleans area that guns were being confiscated, Gottlieb immediately demanded an explanation.
“Our inquiries about these confiscations were cavalierly ignored,” he said, “as were our demands for a public explanation from the police and city officials about why citizens were being unlawfully disarmed, leaving them defenseless against lingering bands of looters and thugs.”
Working with Virginia attorney Stephen Halbrook, a nationally-recognized Second Amendment expert, Baton Rouge attorney Daniel Holliday, NRA and SAF sent investigators into the storm-ravaged New Orleans area to find and contact citizens whose guns had been confiscated. In the process, investigators discovered that citizens whose firearms had been taken were not being given receipts for their property, thus creating a situation where it could be almost impossible for many gunowners to ever recover their guns because they might be unable to verify ownership.
Gun Week learned of one man who had 14 firearms seized, apparently by St. Tammany officers and National Guardsmen. This individual apparently was given a receipt, and was allegedly told that he would get his guns back, “hopefully in two to three months.”
The man subsequently contacted a New Orleans police officer who apparently told him that St. Tammany officers had no jurisdiction in New Orleans, nor any right to seize his firearms. When the man then contacted St. Tammany police, demanding the return of his firearms, authorities allegedly refused.
Both SAF and NRA had condemned what amounted to the warrantless searches of residences, and in a couple of cases, boats on Lake Pontchartrain, and seizures of all firearms. Incredibly, in at least one case caught on film by an ABC News camera crew, soldiers with the visiting Oklahoma National Guard placed two people in handcuffs, took their firearms, and then released them to remain in the city, which at the time was in chaos, with gangs of roving thugs, and packs of hungry dogs posing equal dangers.
In that video, a guardsman identified as Fred Bible, observed, “It’s surreal. You never expect to do this in your own country.” In another scene, guardsman Chris Montgomery acknowledged that he was uncomfortable with the prospect that he might have to open fire on an American citizen as his unit was trying to force people to evacuate.
As word of the confiscations spread, gun rights activists flooded Internet chat groups with comments ranging from disbelief to disgust. A few opined that gun rights organizations like SAF and NRA had been vindicated after years of warnings that arbitrary gun confiscations could happen in emergency situations, leaving people defenseless.
The joint NRA-SAF investigation discovered one incident involving Teel, a resident of St. Tammany Parish, whose boat was boarded twice on Lake Pontchartrain, when he was working for the Pala Interstate Company in an effort to find an open path from the north shore of the lake to the New Orleans Industrial Canal.
He was stopped by a St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s patrol boat, and in his affidavit, he asserted that there were five officers on board, four in uniform, and that they identified themselves as members of the New York First Response Team assigned to St. Tammany Parish. Gun Week has learned that about 180 New York City police officers had traveled to the area following the hurricane to help put down the anarchy and looting that followed.
Teel said that the officers asked whether there were firearms aboard, and he told them that he had two rifles, a Browning chambered in .270 Winchester and a Savage chambered in 7mm Magnum. While two of the New York officers kept him covered with rifles, two other officers boarded his boat, searched it and took Teel’s rifles, while the fifth man refused to give him a receipt for the guns. They only told him the guns would be taken to the St. Tammany Parish courthouse where he could get them later.
The officers apparently told Teel the guns were being seized under cover of some Parish ordinance, but he does not recall a specific cite.
In only one case where firearms were taken was there apparently a warrant issued, and that was in the case of a search, conducted by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). In that case, ATF took guns that were part of a collection of World War I and World War II military firearms, and subsequently advised the owner where the guns were, and that they would be returned to him promptly when he is able to either return to his home or establish some other residence and storage accommodations.
None of the other seizures, including the one filmed by ABC News and another caught on film by a news team from KTVU in San Francisco, apparently were done with the benefit of a warrant. The KTVU news footage has become infamous, because it shows members of the California Highway Patrol, working with Louisiana State Police, going into the home of a woman identified as Patricia Konie.
Armed with a small-caliber revolver, Konie asked the officers to leave her home. Instead, she was tackled by two of them and disarmed, then led from the house, put on a military truck and taken to the New Orleans Convention Center—scene of reported rapes and murders—for evacuation. Her current whereabouts is still unknown as this issue goes to press.
Both Gottlieb and LaPierre told Gun Week that the situation was so outrageous that they had no alternative to taking direct action.
“New Orleans officials left us with no recourse,” Gottlieb observed. “It was bad enough that Big Easy residents were victims of the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history. That they would be subsequently victimized by their own local government, taking their personal property without warrant, is unconscionable.”
“At a time of chaos,” LaPierre noted, “the very underpinning of a citizen’s right to survive (was seized). . . . The last time law-abiding citizens were disarmed, it was done by King George, and that didn’t work for him, either.”
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