In April, after nearly two years of stonewalling by untruthful New Orleans officials, representatives of the National Rifle Association finally were allowed to begin the inventory of guns city officials long claimed didn’t exist. What those involved in the inventory found was hundreds of confiscated firearms neglected by city officials to the point that many, even if returned to their rightful owners, will never be able to be used again.

   It’s a story of government run amok—illegal confiscation of lawfully-owned firearms, mistreatment and neglect of confiscated property, a litany of lies concerning the confiscation, and long-term stonewalling of nra’s attempt to get firearms back to their rightful owners. And it’s a story we must never allow to happen again.
First, however, some background.
Guns Will Be Taken Days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, New Orleans was without power or water, and 80 percent of its area was flooded. On Sept. 8, 2005, the eleventh day after the storm, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Eddie Compass looked into the camera lens of an abc News crew and made his famous “no guns” speech:
“No one will be able to be armed. Guns will be taken. Only law enforcement will be allowed to have guns.”
Compass made this outrageous statement in conjunction with Mayor Ray Nagin’s instructions to get tougher on the stay-behinds and to force them to leave the city by any means short of physical violence.
If police caught these citizens on the street or in their vehicles (Louisiana law allows the carrying of firearms in vehicles, considering them to be an extension of the home), the police shook them down. Police then took their guns, even if citizens had Right-to-Carry licenses.
In many cases, police forced their way into homes and removed guns, leaving no identification, no receipts, no way for the homeowners to find their confiscated property.
NRA Takes Action Because of illegal searches and seizures by law enforcement, the National Rifle Association began receiving dozens of calls. In light of the illegal confiscations, Dan Holliday, a Baton Rouge attorney representing the nra, asked the u.s. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana for a preliminary injunction against the city of New Orleans.
Federal Judge Jay Zainey ordered the city to stop seizing citizens’ firearms, and to begin restoring the guns to their rightful owners.
However, New Orleans ignored the injunction. In February 2006, Holliday and Stephen Halbrook, noted constitutional scholar and attorney for the nra, filed a contempt motion with the u.s. District Court against Mayor Nagin and Warren Riley, the new superintendent.
On the day of filing, the city attorney, Joseph Vincent DiRosa, met with Halbrook and Holliday outside the courtroom and told them he had apparently been laboring under a misconception. The city apparently was holding some firearms. But according to DiRosa, these were guns that had been turned in to the nopd by other law enforcement agencies and National Guard troops.
DiRosa escorted the attorneys to a property and evidence facility and allowed them to view a trailer and a large rental truck containing what appeared to be nearly 1,000 guns, stored since September 2005. The guns lay rusting in a pile in the back of a large, dank trailer. A few long guns stood in plastic garbage cans, muzzles down, and plastic crates contained some of the handguns.
The three attorneys then hammered out an agreement by which New Orleans would begin returning the guns to their rightful owners.
Stonewalling The Inventory The nopd made a few fitful attempts to return firearms, but few people actually had their property returned. In most cases, law enforcement did not give citizens receipts for their guns upon confiscation, and many citizens were not allowed to copy down the serial numbers as the gun confiscation took place.
The nra asked for relief from the courts, seeking access to firearms held in storage by the nopd in order to inventory and return the firearms. In early December 2006, nra counsel sought access to conduct
the inventory.
nra attorneys then assembled a group of volunteers to conduct the inventory and set the date for the Christmas holiday season in 2006. But the city attorney continued to ignore the scheduling and discovery orders, causing the inventory teams’ December trip to be canceled at the last minute. Consequently, Holliday filed a contempt motion against the city attorney.
At that hearing, Federal Judge Carl J. Barbier instructed the city of New Orleans to comply with discovery deadlines which included an inventory of the firearms set for March 14. But as that date approached, Holliday made continued and determined attempts to reach DiRosa, only to be frustrated and ignored each time.
Holliday mailed letters requesting a conversation to confirm the date was solid. He e-mailed DiRosa’s office. When he called DiRosa’s office, he was told that the city attorney was not in. A few days before March 14, DiRosa’s office again canceled the inventory, claiming police background checks had to be run
on the nra volunteers, whose names he had already possessed for several months.
The judge was not pleased. In a hearing on this latest stonewalling, the judge accepted the contempt motion from the nra and asked DiRosa his reasons for ignoring repeated attempts by nra attorneys to make contact with him. When DiRosa admitted he had “no good reasons” for ignoring continued contacts, the judge found him in contempt and declared his actions to be “wholly unprofessional, and not to be condoned.”
Judge Barbier then ordered DiRosa to pay partial legal fees to nra’s attorneys for their time.
April 2007—A Gruesome Find Finally, the city agreed to a date, and on April 18 the nra team, including the authors of this story, arrived at the storage facility where they found more than 800 firearms remaining, many rusted beyond repair—now tagged and stashed in barrels and crates.
When an officer unlocked the Ryder truck holding the cache of confiscated firearms, Holliday waved into the truck body and said, “That’s them. If anything, they look worse than before.”
Each gun had an evidence card that listed the name of the officer, his unit, his badge number and the location of the confiscation. A few of the cards held information identifying possible ownership. A line on each card said “Confiscated From:” In most cases, someone had scrawled, “scene.”
The nra’s inventory team members—wearing black ball caps emblazoned with the nra logo—set up quickly outside and worked in a fenced area, amid crates and barrels of rusty guns. On a nearby street, traffic often slowed, with passersby watching curiously.
Surrounded by computers, cameras and filthy guns, the team began listing information in a database and photographing the firearms for later study and an attempt to locate the people named on the evidence cards.
It appeared the nopd had attempted to inventory some of the guns since Halbrook and Holliday had first seen them. Police representatives on hand for the inventory proffered an incomplete listing (in hard copy only) to the crew. Holliday surmised that when he had first seen the guns, only about
10 percent had been inventoried.
The crew quickly adapted its database to include the pertinent police information—the fbi, California Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (batfe) were also indicated on the cards as having confiscated some of the firearms.
Soon, the crew began to notice that some of the handguns had been irreparably damaged by factors other than the flooding and the subsequent lack of care taken by those who had stored them. One of the team members, a former law enforcement officer, commented on it first.
“Here’s another one,” he said, lifting a small revolver aloft, the cylinder open. “Anyone else found revolvers with the crane bent, so the cylinder won’t close?”
Several of the crew affirmed they had found similarly damaged guns. These guns proved the claims of several New Orleans residents who, in earlier depositions to nra attorneys, described their guns being broken before their very eyes by officers stomping the guns into the pavement.
The crew also found several loaded guns amid the crates filled with handguns. Within a few minutes of informing the attorney and policeman onsite that loaded firearms were included in the mix, a police lieutenant showed up and assured the crew that the police did not place loaded guns into evidence.
One of the crew showed him an evidence tag marked “loaded gun!” The lieutenant then said they had an “opener” for such guns—a hammer. But he was warned against using such force on loaded firearms, no matter what the condition, and the lieutenant grudgingly agreed. During the inventory period, several loaded guns were found—all of which had been sitting in piles in crates, juggled while moved, and affected by heat and humidity during the last year and a half.
Over lunch, several police officers visited the inventory site and talked casually to the crew about the surreal atmosphere during Katrina and its aftermath. One officer told of how the police heard “looters and shooters” were coming to get them in the aftermath of Katrina. Fearful of attack, they turned the Hyatt Hotel in New Orleans into their private fortress, forming a perimeter of protection around the building and even placing snipers on the roof.
Yet at that very same time other police continued to illegally take firearms from New Orleans’ law-abiding citizens. It seems inconceivable that officers would continue confiscating guns from citizens with no other means of protection, when even the police felt unable to protect themselves. Yet that is exactly what occurred.
During the April inventory period, the nra team made two trips to the evidence collection facility, inventorying 218 rusted and severely damaged firearms. At press time, attorney Holliday was negotiating again with the city to set dates for further inventories.
Despite a near complete lack of cooperation from city officials from the very beginning, the nra fully intends to examine every gun and make every possible effort to contact the owners who can be identified and return their firearms. In the meantime, through nra-sponsored emergency protection laws passed in 19 states since the New Orleans confiscations, and currently being considered in several others, nra is working to make sure the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens are never again trashed during a time of natural disaster.