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Gun Grab tells another, equally disturbing side of Katrina story

As book titles related to Hurricane Katrina continue to accumulate, more and more voices of storm survivors are being heard. While many of these books focus on the most unfortunate victims of the storm — those people whose homes were destroyed by flood waters, who lost family members, who wound up at the Superdome or Morial Convention Center, who were eventually evacuated — others tell the tales of those who stayed behind.

Most of these stories are written in the first person and recount scavenging for food, water and ice — usually involving some casual looting — and dealing with the day-to-day challenges of living in a flooded city that was, paradoxically, without a public water supply or electricity. A very interesting new book tells the story of several people who decided to stay behind and protect their property, and, in the process, became embroiled in a Constitutional issue that has yet to be resolved.

The Great New Orleans Gun Grab (Louisiana Publishing Inc., $19.95 softcover) by Gordon Hutchinson and Todd Masson, is the story of how business owners and homeowners who decided stay behind and protect their property found themselves in conflict with civil authorities. They were all gun owners and were prepared to protect their property with deadly force. The police disarmed many of them and confiscated some of their guns.

“These people were not bothering civil authorities. Nor were they crying for rescue, asking for food, or demanding to be evacuated because they had stayed behind and no longer wanted to suffer the consequences of their poor choices.

“Instead, these people were self-sufficient,” the authors write.

The authors use anecdotes in the voices of the people who had conflicts with the New Orleans Police over guns. People like attorney Aston O’Dwyer, who stayed behind to keep his St. Charles Avenue home from being looted. He was armed, and he knew his rights. He didn’t intend to shoot except in self-defense. He made sure he was visible to people out on the street in front of his house. He had declared war on looters.

“One of O’Dwyer’s tactical maneuvers in the war was to keep himself always visible to looters. Like jackals or hyenas, looters are furtive figures, stricken by cowardice, who move in on the kill of others.”

But O’Dwyer’s high visibility, his eloquence and passion, drew media attention, and that got him in the spotlight as a symbol of what some saw as a dangerous vigilante movement. One night, the authors write, he was arrested on his own property by Louisiana State Police who confiscated his handgun and transported O’Dwyer to the temporary jail at a bus station.

“‘I knew my rights,’ Aston said. ‘I was on my own property: they had no right to be doing this. I said, ‘Who are you guys? Why are you doing this to me? Am I under arrest? What is the nature of the charges?’ I was very vocal in asking why this was happening.’”

After being put into the temporary holding pen, O’Dwyer is sprayed with pepper spray three times. He is slapped on the head. Then he is shot with a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with “beanbag rounds” — shell loaded with nylon bags containing lead shot. He says he was shot several times, resulting in several wounds. There are photographs in the book to corroborate his story.  All the while, O’Dwyer keeps up a clamor, shouting that he is a lawyer, shouting out his name and address.

“I wanted somebody to know I was there.”

The next day he was released and informed that he had been charged with public intoxication.

“‘No. 1, I was not intoxicated. No. 2, I was not in public. I was sitting in my own driveway, and No. 3, I was never breathalyzed, I was not given a field sobriety test, and they never drew blood.”

O’Dwyer wound up filing a lawsuit. He never got his gun back, the authors write.

Hutchinson and Masson interviewed homeowners, bar owners and many others and put together the most striking accounts of what happened to gun owners in New Orleans after Katrina. You can argue that people didn’t need the guns, that they are dangerous and no one needs to have one, but you can’t argue that it’s illegal to own a gun. It’s not. The authors make clear again and again that martial law was never declared in New Orleans. The gun seizures were illegal.

The writing in this book is surprisingly fresh and entertaining. Hardly a word is wasted. The opening chapter, which details the formation of Hurricane Katrina, is as good and poetic an account of the metrology of the event as has been published in any book so far. But beyond that, the authors raise valid questions as to why Constitutional protections were ignored after the storm. They have an interesting theory about it.

“What triggered the onslaught of almost fascist behavior was the media. The media feeding frenzy that gave us horror stories of mass murders and rapes in the Superdome and Convention Center was stoked and incited by none other than Mayor (Ray) Nagin and Superintendent (Eddie) Compass. These two individuals took hearsay and elevated it to a new art form before passing it along to the media, who lapped it up, digested it, and passed it to a ravenous audience mesmerized by the magnitude of the event and the endless video streams of suffering.”

In that climate of hysteria, Constitutional rights were trampled. It’s been more than two years now, there’s enough distance between us and the events to allow a calm and reasonable discussion of what went wrong and why. It’s time to do that examination of past events and this well-written and incisive book is a good place to start.

More information about the book is available at http://www.neworleansgungrab.com.

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