More America 2.0

Re: the "clergy response teams" about which Bill blogged over the weekend, and I blogged this morning, Shaker Amish451 noted in comments, "I believe the confiscation of fire arms is included in [the DHS program including clergy training] too," to which Wally Whateley replied, "Good luck with that. The GOP has been telling the True Believers for decades that the only amendment they cared about was the second one. Do they really think the GOP base, or anyone else, will just hand those over?"

Well, to add to Bill's rather dire list of fun weekend reading, and my declaration that it must be "Your Worst Tinfoil Fears Come True Day," I figured I'd better share this old video from ABC World News in which the confiscation of legally-owned firearms by our government is detailed. In the aftermath of Katrina, gun-owners were forced—at gunpoint—to hand over their guns, even in areas unaffected by the hurricane.

"No one will be able to be armed. We will take all weapons."


What else can we expect when our government declares martial law? They're going to let people keep their weapons?! Of course they aren't.

The guns were returned months later under pressure from the NRA, although owners claiming a weapon had to produce "either a bill of sale or an affidavit with the weapon's serial number" (right after a devastating hurricane in which many people lost all their records, mind you) and had to submit to a criminal background check.

Now, I don't think it's any secret around here that I'm not a fan of guns, but I'm even less a fan of the government using the excuse of a natural disaster (or a terrorist attack, ahem) to chuck existing civil rights out the window like day-old bread.

There were just so many basic humanitarian issues to worry about in the immediate aftermath of Katrina that stuff like this got lost. And, yeah, the more I read about "clergy response teams" and so forth and so on, the more I'm inclined to believe that the political fallout from that humanitarian crisis was a small price to pay to distract Americans' attention from their government's using the disaster as a dry-run for martial law population management.

Which is, um, scary.