On September 8, 2005, P. Edwin Compass III, superintendent of police in New Orleans, said civilians are being allowed to carry firearms in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “Only the law are allowed to have weapons,” he said.
New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin, said the Second Amendment would not be tolerated in New Orleans and soon the police, National Guard, the Oklahoma National Guard and U.S. Marshals began going from house to house taking the guns away from citizens.
“A disaster can bring out predators ready to loot, riot and looting by the time they have a chance,” wrote The program includes a gun buyback program for unwanted guns, $100 to informants who give police information that leads to an arrest for an illegal weapon and an option to allow citizens to write down the manufacturers and serial numbers of all their weapons and give the information to the police department in case the weapons are stolen, lost or turn up in a crime.
Although Webster said registering their guns with the city was entirely voluntary, the thought of turning over lists of firearms to city officials didn’t sit well with members of the West Virginia Citizens Defense League, a lobbying group and the state’s largest organization of gun owners.
“The definition of voluntary is always going to be questionable if the guy asking you to volunteer has a gun, a badge and the power of the government behind him,” said West Virginia Citizens Defense League president Keith Morgan.
Morgan, a Charleston resident, said the citizens defense league has several hundred members throughout the state. The group lobbies on gun rights issues, and was active in helping convince state lawmakers to pass the state’s castle doctrine law in 2008. The law puts into writing West Virginia citizens’ right to use deadly force to defend themselves in their own homes.
Morgan and other members of the defense league fear that registration — voluntary or otherwise — is the first step in an outright ban on guns. “Gun registration is a necessary prerequisite to gun confiscation,” Morgan said in a news release this week.
But Webster said Charleston officials aren’t out to catalog or confiscate anyone’s guns. “It’s purely voluntary,” the police chief said. “You don’t have to turn the [registration] card in to us.”
Webster said the point of offering to keep records of city residents’ guns is to help track them down if they’re lost or stolen. Jerry and Joseph Kane, the father-son pair who murdered two West Memphis police officers and badly wounded two more this May before being shot to death themselves, were true believers. They had traveled the country giving seminars in a practice that supposedly allows people to avoid home foreclosure — one of many sovereign-citizen schemes popping up around the country. The strength of their beliefs was reflected in the angry rants of the elder Kane’s common-law wife, Donna Lee Wray, who didn’t seem to spend much time grieving. Instead, in line with sovereign theory, she demanded $1 million from those who wrote about the case (including me) for each time they mentioned her “copyrighted” name.
How does this kind of conspiracist thinking lead to violence?
Michael Barkun, a professor emeritus at Syracuse University and the author of A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, said that most of those who believe in such theories end up convinced that anyone who disputes their ideas “is just another part of the plot. They’re either members of the conspiracy or lackeys of it. Everything is connected to everything else. What may be utterly mundane to us has sinister connotations for the conspiracy.
0 comments:
Post a Comment