Reason Magazine - Contributors

Guns Don't Kill People, Gun Control Kills People

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 13:57:00 EST

The country of Uganda plans to send about 1,500 troops to Somalia as part of an African Union peace-keeping force. The goal is to stabilize the weak government of Somalia, with the hope that the warlords will voluntarily disarm. Hopefully, Ugandan troops will be more successful in Somalia than they have in their own country.

For months now, Ugandan army troops have been garrisoned in the northeast part of the country under orders to disarm the local populace—pastoral, cattle-herding tribes known as the Karamojong. The army is attempting, and failing, to quash an uprising which was caused by a prior attempt to disarm the same tribes.

But in its effort to "disarm," the Ugandan army, supported by tanks and helicopter gunships, is burning down villages, sexually torturing men, raping women, and plundering what few possessions the tribespeople own. Tens of thousands of victims have been turned into refugees. Human rights scholar Ben Knighton has used the term “ethnocide” to describe the army's campaign.

This is not the first time the central government in Kampala, Uganda, has persecuted the Karamojong. During the Idi Amin regime, the Karamojong were selected as special targets for genocide. Against Amin's armies, their traditional bows and arrows were futile. So it's understandable why they'd be reluctant to voluntarily lay down their weapons.

This time, the pretext for the "disarmament" of the Karamojong is United Nations gun control. The Ugandan military is trying to round up every last firearm in Karamoja, supposedly for the Karamojong's own good.

The procedure is euphemistically called “forcible disarmament.” It works something like this: The misnamed Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) will torture and rape Karamajong, after which some Karamojong might then disclose the location of some hidden guns. Or the army will burn down a village, after which it might find some guns in the ash left behind.

If the pastoral tribespeople's bloody history with Amin weren't enough, they don't much have reason to trust the current government of Uganda, either. The current government has repeatedly broken its promises of goods, services, and personal protection for tribespeople who voluntarily disarmed.

According to David Pulkol, the former Director of External Security Organisation (part of the Ugandan government’s intelligence agency), the disarmament process is a tactic to facilitate robbing the Karamojong of their resources. The Daily Monitor newspaper, for example, reports that the Ugandan government has announced plans to confiscate “about 1,903 sq km out of the total area of 2,304 sq km of the Pian Upe game reserve” for private investment purposes.

This government predation has naturally sparked resistance. More and more Karamojong are wearing traditional ethnic garb—not only as a symbol of solidarity, but also because the loose clothing makes it so easy to conceal weapons. The tribes are also uniting and improving their tactical skills. The weapons that had been taken by the government have been replaced by better ones from the ubiquitous black market. The helicopters that have been bombing the populace and burning their villages are now at risk from high-powered rifles. The Karamojong women aren't remaining passive while their families suffer, starve, and die, either. Some Karamojong widows have taken their husband’s firearms and are actively defending themselves, their families, and their cattle.

Last summer, the Ugandan army's atrocities led the United Nations Development Programme to cut off its disarmament aid to Uganda. But the outrage didn't last long. This year, the aid was restored. Although the United Nations does not fund the Ugandan army, the UN does provide a public relations sanction for the disarmament. In November, Louise Arbour, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated: “The actions of the UPDF do not comply with international human rights law and domestic law.” But, she also stipulated, “the decision of the Government to undertake renewed efforts to eradicate illegal weapons in Karamoja is essential….” Never mind that the disarmament campaign also eradicates people.

If the Karamojong didn’t have to worry about the central government targeting them for genocide, or stealing their land, one could possibly make an argument that they would be better off without guns. The various tribes have a long tradition of inter-tribal cattle rustling, and the cattle-raiding would undoubtedly be less dangerous if perpetrated with stone-age weapons instead of AK-47s. But as a practical matter, there have been numerous instances of civilians who have voluntarily disarmed, and were then—despite government promises of protection—robbed by the competing tribes who remained armed. And the loss of even a small number of cattle can place a subsistence level family at risk of starvation. Of course, cattle-rustling never led to the deliberate destruction of entire villages, turning thousands of people into refugees. Nor has it ever paved the way for government theft of the land the tribespeople need to survive.

The number of illegally possessed firearms prior to the disarmament campaign had been estimated at between 50,000 and 150,000. On November 10, New Vision reported that “since this year began, they have recovered 4,500 guns.” So the Ugandan government is wiping out the very people the government ostensibly claims to protect, and that "protection" amounts to just 3-9 percent of unauthorized weapons. And all the while, the Ugandan government is using its own guns to destroy Karamoja, burn villages, slaughter the defenseless, and perpetrate ethnocide.

Seems like the kind of "protection" the Karamojong could live without.

David Kopel is research director for the Independence Institute. Paul Gallant and Joanne D. Eisen are senior fellows at the Independence Institute.

After the Storm

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST

On August 29, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Louisiana coast, directly devastating several coastal towns and flooding the city of New Orleans, whose levees were not strong enough to withstand the water. In the days that followed, over a thousand people died. Looting broke out in the sunken city, and evacuees were directed to the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center, where the authorities proved themselves unable to cope with the hungry, thirsty, and sometimes violent crowds. Americans were horrified by both the damage wrought by the weather and the stunning incompetence of the local, state, and federal response.

If a single moment defined that first week, it came on September 1, as thousands of people found themselves stranded at the convention center without food and water. They had been gathering there for days, and the media had been covering them almost from the beginning; some starving refugees had died right in front of the reporters. And Michael Brown, then-chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN's Paula Zahn that "the federal government did not even know about the convention center people until today."

Yet no government screwup is so colossal that it can't be used to justify yet more government. For most liberals, Katrina merely proved that Washington needs more resources to prevent and respond to such disasters; for many conservatives, it proved that society is a fragile construct that can collapse into chaos at any moment, and that only police or military force can hold it together in times of stress. As the following six reports reveal, those positions hardly exhaust the range of possible responses to the disaster and its aftermath.

Nightmare in New Orleans

Do disasters destroy social cooperation?

Jesse Walker

People couldn't help contrasting the catastrophes. During the first disaster, New Yorkers remained calm, cooperative, and nonviolent; the crime rate plunged, and the city was overwhelmed with spontaneous acts of mutual aid. In the second emergency, the most basic social bonds seemed to disintegrate. As Newsweek put it, "the night was alight with fires, the pavement was alive with looters."

If you compare 9/11 with Hurricane Katrina, you'll provoke protests: Osama's attacks were awful, your critics will say, but they hit only one part of Manhattan and they left most of the city's infrastructure unscathed. But the two disasters I'm describing are the New York blackouts of 1965 and 1977. The first knocked out far more of the grid than the second, but communal ties seemed to strengthen rather than fray. The latter, by contrast, set off 25 hours of arson, looting, and chaos. The most striking quote in that Newsweek piece came from a rioter in Harlem. "We made a mistake in '65," he said. "But we're going to clean up in '77."

When disaster strikes, the results usually look a lot more like '65 than '77. The civic breakdown we saw in New Orleans is extremely atypical, not just next to smaller-scale emergencies such as 9/11 but next to some of the worst natural and technological catastrophes of recent history. "In the more modern, developed countries, looting is not a problem after disasters," says the sociologist E. L. Quarantelli, a co-founder of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware and one of the pioneers of the field. There are "some exceptions," he adds, but they're "very rare." More than a half-century of investigation has established a fairly firm pattern: After the cataclysm, volunteerism will explode, violence will be rare, looting will appear only under exceptional circumstances, and the vast majority of the rescues will be accomplished by the real first responders--the victims themselves.

When an earthquake hit Tanghsan, China, in 1976, it was "probably the worst peacetime disaster of the century," writes Erik Auf der Heide, a medical officer with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in his contribution to the 2004 book The First 72 Hours: A Community Approach to Disaster Preparedness. About 250,000 people were killed, and almost every building in the city was destroyed--but "200,000 to 300,000 victims rescued themselves and then carried out 80% of the rescue of others." Such proportions were neither an aberration nor peculiar to earthquakes: Auf der Heide cites similar patterns following flash floods, tornadoes, and a deadly gas explosion.

The Kobe quake of 1995, which killed 6,279 people, produced a reaction that was--to quote "Emergency Response: Lessons Learned from the Kobe Earthquake," a 1997 paper by Kathleen Tierney and James D. Goltz--"without precedent in Japanese society." Although volunteerism isn't nearly as widespread in Japan as it is in the United States, "most search and rescue was undertaken by community residents; officially-designated rescue agencies such as fire departments and the Self Defense Forces were responsible for recovering at most one quarter of those trapped in collapsed structures. Spontaneous volunteering and emergent group activity were very widespread throughout the emergency period; community residents provided a wide range of goods and services to their fellow earthquake victims, and large numbers of people traveled from other parts of the country to offer aid." Quarantelli says there wasn't a single authenticated case of looting.

After the San Francisco quake of 1989, Stewart Brand wrote in Whole Earth Review that "volunteer rescuers in San Francisco's Marina District...outnumbered professionals three-to-one during the critical first few hours." (Although, he added, "it still wasn't enough.") According to Auf der Heide, most of the tremor's fatalities followed the collapse of the Cypress Expressway, and the rescue operation that followed was led by self-organizing samaritans. "These volunteers, coming from residences and businesses in the neighborhood or passing by on the street and freeway, performed some of the first rescues of trapped motorists," the Oakland Fire Department acknowledged in its earthquake report. "Using makeshift ladders, ropes, and even the trees planted beside the freeway, these volunteers scrambled up onto the broken structure to render first aid and help the injured and dazed to safety."

When looting does follow a disaster, most of it is done covertly by individuals or small groups snatching something when they think no one's looking, not by mobs acting openly. Half a century of research has revealed only four American exceptions: during the blackout of 1977; in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands following Hurricane Hugo in 1989; in and around Homestead, Florida, after Hurricane Andrew in 1992; and in New Orleans this year.

What happened after Hugo seemed so unusual that Quarantelli visited the island three times to investigate the chain of events. If you followed the news from New Orleans, the variables at work in St. Croix should sound familiar.

First, says Quarantelli, "it's a tourist area, and one thing that stood out is that the tourists that come there are very wealthy, while the native population is very, very poor." Second, "there's an underclass that engages in a lot of petty crime," and it includes juvenile gangs who launched the looting and "in a sense were simply acting on a larger scale than they normally do." Third, the police department was "ineffective, corrupt, and full of nepotism," and many officers joined in the larceny themselves. Put those factors together with the massive impact of the hurricane and the relative isolation of the island, and you had a recipe for riots.

Indeed, while events in New York, St. Croix, Homestead, and New Orleans differ radically from the usual behavior seen after catastrophes, they do resemble the sort of angry urban disorder that emerges not from without but from within. "In riots," explains Quarantelli, "looting is overt, it's socially supported, it's engaged in by almost everyone, and also it's targeted looting, in the sense that people break into alcohol stores and drug stores and things of that kind." That, he discovered, is what happened in St. Croix, and it is largely what occurred in the other three examples as well. "You could make the argument," he says of the '77 blackout, "that what happened there was less a technological disaster than simply the breakout of another riot": another Watts in another long, hot summer. The disparity between '77 and '65 reflected different social and economic conditions, just as St. Croix broke out in looting while other places battered by Hugo--Puerto Rico, the Carolinas--maintained social order.

"But even that's got to be put in context," Quarantelli concludes. "When all is said and done, while people paid attention to the looting and it certainly did occur, the pro-social behavior [in St. Croix] far outweighed the anti-social behavior." In fact, in every disaster he's studied, "the height of the emergency is when people are nicest to one another." In St. Croix, residents rescued their neighbors, gave shelter to the homeless, and shared their supplies; even the looting itself was often a matter of desperate but nonviolent citizens taking survival necessities, not gangs seizing luxury goods. (It's not even clear that it's properly theft to take, say, food that's bound to spoil before its owner can return to reclaim it.) Rumors of murders, armed robbery, and the like generally turned out to be unverified, exaggerated, or simply inaccurate.

In New Orleans there were some genuine firsthand accounts of violent assaults, but the rumor mill worked overtime as well. Meanwhile, we also heard stories of spontaneous cooperation on the ground--notably the heroic tales of Deamonte Love, the 6-year-old boy who led five toddlers and a baby out of the flood zone, and Jabbar Gibson, the young man who commandeered an abandoned school bus, drove it to Houston with around 70 people aboard, and arrived there well in advance of the official convoy. The Baltimore Sun described a group of about 40 people who turned the Samuel J. Green Charter School into a well-supplied, well-fed, well-protected little republic. The New Orleans Times-Picayune recounted how a neighborhood association in Algiers Point formed a "makeshift militia" to protect the area. Rolling Stone talked to civilians in motorboats who spent days ferrying flood victims to dry land, rescuing far more people than the authorities did during the first week that followed the storm. Neighbors saved neighbors from the rising waters, volunteers patrolled their communities, and evacuees who owned vehicles gave lifts to people who didn't. Quarantelli is almost certain we'll learn that such cooperation and initiative greatly outnumbered the widely reported crimes.

There was one additional factor in Katrina that wasn't present in the other cases: what Quarantelli calls "the worst mishandled disaster I've ever seen in my life, and I've been studying disasters since 1949." The full story of what went wrong has yet to be fully uncovered, but it seems more and more clear that, far from working closely with volunteers and rival authorities, the Department of Homeland Security--the giant new bureaucracy that absorbed the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2003--adopted a command-and-control approach that at times worked actively against the other responses. Anecdotes abound not just of well-qualified civilians being turned away from the disaster zone but of public employees being poorly deployed, such as the 1,400 firefighters who were assigned to do community relations work. Worst of all were the squalid holding camps at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center, where authority was omnipresent but order was absent.

The local government clearly botched the initial evacuation of New Orleans, leaving hundreds of empty buses to drown while carless citizens were stranded, but a deeper problem with the exodus might be the local initiative that was blocked. Fred Smith, the president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and, more to the point, a native Louisianan who monitored events there as closely as he could, says: "There were avenues in and out of the city--people could have been enlisted to come into the city to make pickups, and the problem could have been alleviated much earlier. America has cars and boats and buses and vans, but they weren't called on. In World War II, Paris was saved because taxis rushed French troops to the front. Why couldn't New Orleans have done the same?"

The most appalling allegations come from the leftist activists Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, who were attending a conference of emergency medical services workers in New Orleans when the hurricane struck. Their widely circulated story is a litany both of inspiring self-organization on the ground and of astonishing official mistreatment and neglect. Among other things, they claim that a police officer broke up their embarrassingly situated encampment--it was adjacent to the command station--by falsely telling them that buses were waiting for them on the other side of the Greater New Orleans Bridge. They also wrote that armed officers then blocked them from entering Mississippi on foot. (The latter allegation has been corroborated by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Fox News, among other outlets.)

At that point, they say, some of them took direct action:

"Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an Army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.

"Now--secure with these two necessities, food and water--cooperation, community and creativity flowered. We organized a clean-up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom, and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas and other scraps. We even organized a food-recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

"This was something we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. But when these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community."

I can't vouch for their account, but I can attest to that final point. People do look out for each other in emergencies, even when other social bonds begin to break. The best response to a disaster will embrace that fact. The worst will work against it.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker (jwalker@reason.com) is author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).

Defenseless on the Bayou

New Orleans gun confiscation was foolish and illegal.

Dave Kopel

During the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the government of New Orleans devolved from its traditional status as an elective kleptocracy into something far more dangerous: an "anarcho-tyranny" that refused to protect the public from criminals while preventing people from protecting themselves. On the orders of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, the New Orleans Police Department, the National Guard, the Oklahoma National Guard, and the U.S. Marshals Service began breaking into homes at gunpoint, confiscating lawfully owned firearms, and evicting the residents. "No one is allowed to be armed," said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "We're going to take all the guns."

Those thousands of New Orleanians huddled in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center got a taste of anarcho-tyranny. Everyone entering those buildings was searched for firearms. So for a few days, they lived in a small world without guns. As in other such worlds, the weaker soon became the prey of the stronger.

In the rest of the city, some police officers abandoned their posts, while others joined the looting spree. For several days, the ones who stayed on the job did not act to stop the looting that was going on right in front of them. When homes or businesses were saved, the saviors were the many good citizens of New Orleans who defended them with their own firearms.

These people were operating within their legal rights. The law authorizes citizen's arrests for any felony, and in the 1964 case McKellar v. Mason a Louisiana court held that shooting a property thief in the spine was a legitimate citizen's arrest.

The aftermath of the hurricane featured prominent stories of citizens defending lives and property. Most of New Orleans lies on the north side of the Mississippi River, while the neighborhood of Algiers is on the south. The Times-Picayune detailed how dozens of neighbors in one part of Algiers had formed a militia. After a carjacking and an attack on a home by looters, the neighborhood recognized the need for a common defense; residents shared firearms, took turns on patrol, and guarded the elderly. Although the initial looting had resulted in a gun battle, once the patrols began the militia never had to fire a shot. Likewise, the Garden District of New Orleans, one of the city's top tourist attractions, was protected by armed residents.

The good gun-owning citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding areas should have been thanked for helping to save some of their city after Mayor Nagin, incoherent and weeping, had fled. Yet instead these citizens were victimized by a new round of home invasions and looting, these government-organized, for the purpose of firearms confiscation.

The mayor and Gov. Kathleen Blanco do have the legal authority to mandate evacuation, but failure to comply is a misdemeanor; so the authority to use force to compel evacuation goes no further than the power to effect a misdemeanor arrest. The pre-emptive confiscation of every private firearm in the city far exceeded any reasonable attempt to carry out misdemeanor arrests for persons who disobey orders to leave.

Louisiana statutory law does allow some restrictions on firearms during extraordinary conditions. One statute says that after the governor proclaims a state of emergency (as Blanco did), "the chief law enforcement officer of the political subdivision affected by the proclamation may...promulgate orders...regulating and controlling the possession, storage, display, sale, transport and use of firearms, other dangerous weapons and ammunition." But the statute does not, and could not, supersede the Louisiana Constitution, which declares that "the right of each citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged, but this provision shall not prevent the passage of laws to prohibit the carrying of weapons concealed on the person."

The power of "regulating and controlling" is not the same as the power of "prohibiting and controlling." The emergency statute actually draws this distinction in its language, which refers to "prohibiting" price gouging, sale of alcohol, and curfew violations but only to "regulating and controlling" firearms. Accordingly, the police superintendent's order "prohibiting" firearms possession was beyond his lawful authority. It was an illegal order.

A week after the confiscations began, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) filed a joint lawsuit in federal court. The parties were represented by Stephen Halbrook, one of the nation's leading Second Amendment attorneys. (Documents from the suit can be found at stephenhalbrook.com.)

Attorneys for Orleans Parish (New Orleans) and St. Tammany Parish (which also confiscated guns) capitulated, under the judge's threat that he would issue a preliminary injunction against them. The parishes and the plaintiffs signed a consent decree in which the parishes asserted (implausibly) that there was never an official government policy of confiscating guns, and also admitted that they had no authorization to confiscate guns pursuant to Louisiana's emergency powers statute. The parties agreed to accept that the court's injunction forbids them from confiscating guns, and orders them to return all guns which have been confiscated.

There will doubtless be many lawsuits that will seek to discover precisely which uniformed looters were responsible for the theft of which guns. (Like the other looters, the uniformed thieves did not give their victims receipts. ) And all over the country next year, there will be bills introduced in state legislatures to make sure that emergency powers cannot be abused to confiscate guns when good people need them most.

After Katrina struck, we saw an awful truth in New Orleans: There is no shortage of police officers and National Guardsmen who will illegally threaten peaceful citizens at gunpoint and confiscate their firearms. We also saw some noble truths: that citizens with firearms will defend law and order even when the government fails. And that our federal courts, as well as civil rights organizations such as NRA and SAF, continue to play an important role in defending constitutional rights against the depredations of lawless "law enforcement" officers.

Dave Kopel (david@i2i.org) is research director of the Independence Institute.

Escape From FEMAville

Housing evacuees is no job for the feds.

Kerry Howley

Before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina, federal and local authorities proved incapable of reacting to dire predictions of destruction, learning from previous catastrophes, or letting more capable organizations lend a hand. An agency led largely by public relations executives rather than emergency management personnel, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, botched even the one disaster it should have been able to cope with: a P.R. nightmare. On September 4, FEMA Director Michael Brown (who resigned eight days later) said the agency was "pulling out all the stops" for its next task, temporary housing.

Not surprisingly, FEMA caught flak for moving slowly on housing as well. But if the history of centralized refugee housing is any indication, the agency's sloth may help more than it harms. FEMA said shelter would take the form of trailers, military bases, and at least four cruise ships. In interviews with The New York Times, Freedom Tower planner Daniel Libeskind suggested a "low-cost modular shelter" he'd designed, and architect Shigeru Ban pitched temporary housing made of cardboard tubes and plastic beer crates.

This is bad. There are few surer ways to make people sick, hopeless, and helpless than to pack them into camp-like conditions for an indefinite period. Katrina's displaced persons are not technically "refugees" (as the law defines the term), and there's a levee-sized space between any international refugee and a New Orleans native waiting for his home to emerge from five feet of toxic water. But current international practices are a how-to guide for turning temporary refugee situations into interminable hellholes.

"Warehousing" is the risk aid workers run when they throw up ad hoc housing with no clear plan to dismantle it. Merrill Smith, editor of World Refugee Survey, published by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), defines it as "the practice of keeping refugees in protracted situations of restricted mobility, enforced idleness, and dependency--their lives on indefinite hold." For refugees in Africa and Asia during the last 20 years, the transition from camp to resettlement has taken longer than at any point in history. To some extent, this is a result of donors' pouring aid into camps rather than integration, keeping refugees contained rather than compensating host countries for absorbing them. Smith describes the change as a shift from "viewing refugees as agents of democracy to seeing them as passive aid recipients."

The results are ugly, as USCRI documents. Throwing refugees together spreads disease, engenders mental health problems, and creates security issues. Camp security has a tendency to turn militant, and authoritarian law enforcement can lead to a "fatalistic paralysis" that makes starting over harder and harder to imagine as time passes. Worst of all, isolation prevents displaced people from forming the social networks that help them spring back. It's tough to hunt for a job when you're packed in with thousands of other homeless, unemployed, increasingly passive people.

Temporary housing goes up faster than it comes down. Abroad, host governments develop bureaucracies that depend on an inflow of aid destined for refugee camps; some camps in Africa have endured for decades. Here in the U.S., mobile homes set up after last year's Hurricane Charley still fill a corner of Punta Gorda; the village has been dubbed "FEMA City." In a September 7 Slate piece on the history of emergency housing, Witold Rybczynski observes that "relief can be the enemy of reconstruction." He's talking about homes and sidewalks, but the wrong kind of relief can keep people from reconstructing their lives as well.

Following the lawlessness of Katrina's immediate aftermath, some shelters turned uncomfortably authoritarian. Reporting from a community college turned shelter in Colorado, The Denver Post described "roadblocks, security guards and enough armed police officers to invade Grenada." Reporters spoke to storm survivors through a fence. Anecdotal reports tell of authorities restricting freedom of movement and keeping evacuees from so much as cooking their own food.

What's the alternative? Consider how we treat actual refugees here. The U.S. absorbs tens of thousands of displaced people every year. We do not stick them on cruise ships or ask famous architects to build cardboard houses for them. Instead, they enter a nexus of volunteer, religious, mutual aid, and ethnic organizations. Private organizations help match immigrants to mentors, and church groups collect clothes and food. The federal government provides cash for at least a few months, but civil society helps people form support networks that will get them clothed, housed, employed, and rooted in a community. That partnership isn't a panacea, but it's no Superdome either.

Shortly after the disaster, The Washington Post ran a story about Anya Maddox, a New Orleans native who barricaded herself in during the storm, swam to a friend's house, caught a ride out of town, and talked her way into a job at a Louisiana Waffle House. "I'm a survivor," she told the Post. Maddox may not realize it, but her triumph was twofold: She eluded both the wrath of a deadly storm and the good intentions of those who would help her recover.

Kerry Howley (khowley@reason.com) is an assistant editor of Reason.

Unnatural Disasters

Is Katrina the beginning of a trend?

Ronald Bailey

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the average number of deaths per year from hurricanes in the United States has been falling. Katrina's rising death toll may have interrupted that positive trend.

Indur Goklany, the assistant director for science and technology policy at the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of Policy Analysis, provides data showing that more than 800 Americans per year lost their lives to hurricanes between 1900 and 1909. A huge portion of those deaths occurred because of the devastating hurricane that killed more than 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas, in 1900. The next highest hurricane death toll occurred between 1920 and 1929, when an average of 253 Americans per year were killed by hurricanes. This number was substantially boosted by a single devastating storm, the Lake Okeechobee hurricane of 1928, in which between 1,700 and 2,300 people lost their lives. Somewhat reminiscent of Katrina's devastation, the hundreds drowned by the 1928 hurricane perished because dikes holding the lake failed.

Nevertheless, since 1930 the average annual number of deaths from hurricanes has been declining more or less steadily, reaching a low of only 13 deaths per year in the 1980s. Goklany shows that the annual death rate per million people also has been falling, sinking to an annual low of only nine deaths per million last decade. The last single hurricane that killed more than 100 Americans was Hurricane Agnes in 1972. This happy trend occurred even though an estimated 50 million additional residents have moved to coastal regions during the last 25 years.

Prior to Katrina, it could reasonably be argued that declining mortality rates from hurricanes in the U.S. were the result of better long-range warning systems, sturdier houses, improved roads, comprehensive evacuation planning, and high-quality hospitals. So why did all this fail when Katrina struck? Is Katrina a fluke, or is it possible that government programs are in fact making us less safe?

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency encourages people to live in harm's way. As of 2004, the NFIP had issued more than 4.4 million flood insurance policies in approximately 20,000 communities nationwide, representing nearly $637 billion in coverage. Since it was established in 1969, the program has paid $12.7 billion in flood insurance claims and related costs. In recent years, the NFIP has collected $1.1 billion in premiums and paid out around $1 billion in damages each year. Currently, the NFIP has about $1.1 billion in reserves; estimates are that the program will have to pay out more than $10 billion in claims for the houses and businesses destroyed by Katrina. People should be told that this is the last time the federal government will pay flood insurance claims to owners in areas prone to flooding. If private insurers want to take the risk, then their stockholders, not taxpayers, will be on the hook.

Let's set aside the larger question of whether the government should be encouraging people to live below sea level. The fact is that the federal government, which is in charge of all navigable waterways, failed to provide adequate infrastructure to prevent the inundation of a city that was home to nearly half a million people. Having taken the responsibility on itself, it failed to deliver on its promise--and it did so for built-in institutional reasons. The failure of the levees protecting New Orleans and other parts of southern Louisiana perfectly illustrates the fact that politicians generally engage in short-term thinking. Merely maintaining or bolstering some boring old levees will not garner many votes. But the senators and representatives who bring home the most tax dollars for restoring New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will become heroes.

The U.S. Congress established the Mississippi River Commission in 1879 to oversee and implement plans to improve navigation and prevent floods. But levee building for flood control in the Mississippi basin remained largely under local and state control until 1917, when the feds took over completely. Until then, states and counties formed levee districts that taxed local citizens for levee construction and maintenance. Local control meant that the people who lived by the levees had to pay for the risks of doing so. In the modern era, instead of taxing local citizens to take care of levees known to be inadequate, New Orleans' political leaders waited for federal money that never came.

Once the hurricane struck, the government got in the way of groups that were poised to offer immediate help. Red Cross officials complained that their volunteers were prevented from helping people in New Orleans on orders from the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and the National Guard. Federal and state officials claim they prevented relief efforts because they were worried for the safety of volunteers. It is true that New Orleans experienced some lawlessness, but perhaps a lot of that could have been forestalled if effective Red Cross and other relief efforts had begun immediately to alleviate the misery of people stuck at the Superdome and the convention center. If the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Baptist Missions, or any other competent group wants to take the risk of helping disaster victims, the government should not stand in its way.

What about the future? The bad news is that a natural 30-year lull in the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes apparently has come to an end. As National Hurricane Center researchers note in a recent technical memorandum, "The decreased death totals in recent years could be as much a result of lack of major hurricanes striking the most vulnerable areas as they are of any fail-proof forecasting, warning, and observing systems." The memo adds: "If warnings are heeded and preparedness plans developed, the death toll can be reduced. In the absence of a change of attitude, policy, or laws governing building practices near the ocean, however, large property losses are inevitable."

After Katrina, it's clear which policies need to change.
It's time for the feds to stop offering flood insurance. It's time for local citizens to take more responsibility for constructing and maintaining the infrastructure that protects them and their property. And it's time for government agencies to stop interfering with private disaster relief efforts.

Ronald Bailey (rbailey@reason.com), reason's science correspondent, is the author of Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution (Prometheus).

You Don't Save What You Don't Own

Disaster amplifies the private-public incentive divide.

Jeff A. Taylor

Let's conduct a little thought experiment. The laboratory stretches from ground zero in Louisiana hundreds of miles up the East Coast, along crippled gasoline supply lines. What if the buses in New Orleans had been privately owned, and the gasoline supply had been a nationalized, government-run quasi-utility?

We know that New Orleans' infamous municipal and school buses were left to be destroyed at the very instant they were needed most. More than 400 were left idle when they should have been pulled back to higher ground for use in those tense days after Katrina hit.

Had there been a futures market on buses in New Orleans, the value of the buses would have skyrocketed as Katrina approached, signaling their increased utility in the emergency. But even without such an overt market signal, any private owner of the vehicles would have exhausted all opportunities to save his or her property. Nobody who owned such a potentially valuable product would have done what New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin did: let it all go to waste, on the assumption that drivers would be impossible to find. Greyhound, after all, did not leave hundreds of its buses to be destroyed. This very fact caused Nagin to scream for "every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country" to come to the aid of his city. And it should go without saying that no private employer would long tolerate a work force that, in Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's memorable description of New Orleans public sector workers, has trouble coming to work even on sunny days.

Now to the flip side. Gasoline prices are nothing but one big futures market, constantly transmitting both the current value and the expected replacement cost of the stuff to consumers. Would a government-run monopoly have permitted prices to zoom past $3 a gallon, reflecting both reduced refining capacity along the Gulf and, more important, power outages on key gasoline pipelines to the East? Or would a government decree have muted this powerful conservation signal to everyone on the supply chain? Judging from the hysterical raving about "price gouging," there is little question that a system of rationing and price controls would have been instituted, thereby guaranteeing long, costly lines to get gas and quite likely an exhaustion of the limited supply as consumers bought too much gas at artificially low prices.

Although craven politicians refuse to see this, the long-term profit-maximizing route for private gasoline production seems to be to try to spread out a constrained supply for as long as possible until something like full capacity is available. In other words, distributors raise prices enough to deter sales, not to "gouge" people. As supply dwindled nearly to exhaustion in some markets, wholesale "over-allocation" fees kicked in. These were intended to discourage one or two distributors from buying up the remaining supply. Try to "corner" the market in gas, and you'll pay an extra 50 cents a gallon. Clueless consumer groups predictably screamed bloody murder about the surcharge, heedless of how this pricing mechanism helped save and spread out a scarce supply and ensure consumers would have some gas to buy at some price.

The motive for the surcharge policy is plain; it has little to do with being "fair" to consumers in the sense that politicians use the word. The worst of all possible worlds is for a gas station to sell out of product. Among other things, it means its door will no longer be darkened by potential customers for the other high-margin merchandise it sells--milk, beer, bread, bottled water. A station owner would much rather sell several thousand gallons less over a few days than eat everything on his store shelves while leaving a permanent impression on customers that he is an unreliable supplier of a vital good. These incentives push the private gasoline owners to conserve their supplies in times of crisis. How do you conserve? By raising the price.

As the public-sector tab for Katrina's clean-up climbs, fans of big government will point to the billions in loans and grants as proof of the value of a robust state. The costs of that same state --and its institutional disinclination to save billions--will be forgotten along with those soggy New Orleans buses.

Jeff A. Taylor (jtaylor@reason.com) writes the weekly e-mail newsletter Reason Express.

A Flood of Red Ink

Katrina's fiscal fallout

Jacob Sullum

Shelley Moore Capito is worried about Hurricane Katrina's fiscal implications. "We don't want to turn rebuilding the Big Easy into the Big Dig," the Republican representative from West Virginia told the Los Angeles Times in September, referring to Boston's notoriously bloated underground highway project. She said the reconstruction effort "is going to require efficiency, which is not something synonymous with the federal government."

Capito herself illustrated the reason Congress cannot be trusted to spend our money wisely when she was asked if she'd be willing to help fund Katrina aid by giving up West Virginia's share of the $25 billion in pork-barrel spending authorized by this year's transportation bill--one target on a list of cuts proposed by the Republican Study Committee, the last bastion of fiscal conservatives in the House. "I don't like that idea," she confessed. "It took three years to get it done. It's a jobs bill."

Nor does Capito like the idea of delaying the new Medicare prescription drug benefit by a year, which the committee estimates would save $31 billion. "I worked hard for that," she said. "It took a lot of time and effort to squeeze it through."

Capito and her colleagues in Congress are all for fiscal responsibility in theory. They're only against it in practice, when it impairs their ability to buy votes with taxpayers' money.

In this case, as with the rest of the money it has been working so hard to spend since George W. Bush was elected, Congress is taking its cues from the president. First he unveiled a grandiose post-Katrina reconstruction plan, promising not only to restore New Orleans but to make it "better and stronger" than ever. The next day, he belatedly mentioned "cutting other programs" but also said reconstruction will "cost whatever it costs."

With preliminary estimates in the area of $200 billion, that blithe attitude is not exactly reassuring. Neither is the 35 percent increase in discretionary spending over which Bush presided in his first term; or his proud advocacy of unnecessary, unconstitutional budget busters such as the Medicare drug benefit and the No Child Left Behind Act; or his record of zero vetoes in five years.

Our president is very generous with other people's money. Worse, he is generous with the money of people who are in no position to object, either because they are too young or because they haven't been born yet.

Heritage Foundation budget analyst Brian Riedl estimates the federal deficit, which was projected to be $331 billion this year before Katrina hit, will rise to $500 billion in 2008 and $873 billion in 2015, largely due to hurricane relief and reconstruction, together with spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. Riedl cautions that "even these estimates could prove overly optimistic."

Without serious spending cuts, Bush's promise of no tax hikes is a fraud. Taxes will go up, since ultimately that's the only way to finance federal spending. It's just a question of when. Either the burden will be imposed on current taxpayers (and the repercussions felt by current politicians), or it will be dumped on our children and grandchildren.

Given this context, it was hard to know whether to laugh or cry when House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) announced that there's no fat left to cut in the budget because "we've pared it down pretty good." At the same time, DeLay made a promise to anyone who managed the impossible feat of finding expendable items in the $2.6 trillion federal budget: "Bring me the offsets. I'll be glad to do it."

Several groups took up the challenge. Off the tops of their heads, two analysts at the Cato Institute came up with enough cuts to cover the $62 billion already authorized for Katrina relief. Taxpayers for Common Sense somehow found $144 billion in fat that DeLay missed. Heritage concluded that "a renewed war on wasteful spending could easily save $100 billion or more a year." The Republican Study Committee proposed cuts that would save $370 billion over five years.

DeLay was no more serious about fiscal responsibility than Shelley Moore Capito. Like her, he cited the jobs "created" by federal spending as reason enough to support it (especially in his district)--a rationale that would justify paying people to dig holes and fill them in again. At least such a project would be preferable to digging holes deeper and deeper, which is the work of Congress.

Defenseless On the Bayou

david@i2i.org (David B. Kopel) — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EDT

In the nearly two weeks since Hurricane Katrina, the government of New Orleans has devolved from its traditional status as an elective kleptocracy into something far more dangerous: an anarcho-tyranny that refuses to protect the public from criminals while preventing people from protecting themselves. At the orders of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, the New Orleans Police, the National Guard, the Oklahoma National Guard, and U.S. Marshals have begun breaking into homes at gunpoint, confiscating their lawfully-owned firearms, and evicting the residents. "No one is allowed to be armed. We're going to take all the guns," says P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police.

Last week, thousands of New Orleanians huddled in the Superdome and the Convention Center got a taste of anarcho-tyranny. Everyone entering those buildings was searched for firearms. So for a few days, they lived in a small world without guns. As in other such worlds, the weaker soon became the prey of the stronger. Tuesday's New Orleans Times-Picayune reported some of the grim results, as an Arkansas National Guardsman showed the reporter dozens of bodies rotting in a non-functional freezer.

In the rest of the city, some police officers abandoned their posts, while others joined the looting spree. For several days, the ones who stayed on the job did not act to stop the looting that was going on right in front of them. To the extent that any homes or businesses were saved, the saviors were the many good citizens of New Orleans who defended their families, homes, and businesses with their own firearms.

These people were operating within their legal rights. The law authorizes citizen's arrests for any felony, and in the past (in the 1964 case McKellar v. Mason), a Louisiana court held that shooting a property thief in the spine was a legitimate citizen's arrest.

The aftermath of the hurricane has featured prominent stories of citizens legitimately defending lives and property. New Orleans lies on the north side of the Mississippi River, and the city of Algiers is on the south. The Times-Picayune detailed how dozens of neighbors in one part of Algiers had formed a militia. After a car-jacking and an attack on a home by looters, the neighborhood recognized the need for a common defense; they shared firearms, took turns on patrol, and guarded the elderly. Although the initial looting had resulted in a gun battle, once the patrols began, the militia never had to fire a shot. Likewise, the Garden District of New Orleans, one of the city's top tourist attractions, was protected by armed residents.

The good gun-owning citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding areas ought to be thanked for helping to save some of their city after Mayor Nagin, incoherent and weeping, had fled to Baton Rouge. Yet instead these citizens are being victimized by a new round of home invasions and looting, these ones government-organized, for the purpose of firearms confiscation.

The Mayor and Governor do have the legal authority to mandate evacuation, but failure to comply is a misdemeanor; so the authority to use force to compel evacuation goes no further than the power to effect a misdemeanor arrest. The preemptive confiscation of every private firearm in the city far exceeds any reasonable attempt to carry out misdemeanor arrests for persons who disobey orders to leave.

Louisiana statutory law does allow some restrictions on firearms during extraordinary conditions. One statute says that after the Governor proclaims a state of emergency (as Governor Blanco has done), "the chief law enforcement officer of the political subdivision affected by the proclamation may...promulgate orders...regulating and controlling the possession, storage, display, sale, transport and use of firearms, other dangerous weapons and ammunition." But the statute does not, and could not, supersede the Louisiana Constitution, which declares that "The right of each citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged, but this provision shall not prevent the passage of laws to prohibit the carrying of weapons concealed on the person."

The power of "regulating and controlling" is not the same as the power of "prohibiting and controlling." The emergency statute actually draws this distinction in its language, which refers to "prohibiting" price-gouging, sale of alcohol, and curfew violations, but only to "regulating and controlling" firearms. Accordingly, the police superintendent's order "prohibiting" firearms possession is beyond his lawful authority. It is an illegal order.

Last week, we saw an awful truth in New Orleans: A disaster can bring out predators ready to loot, rampage, and pillage the moment that they have the opportunity. Now we are seeing another awful truth: There is no shortage of police officers and National Guardsmen who will obey illegal orders to threaten peaceful citizens at gunpoint and confiscate their firearms.

Brothers In Arms

david@i2i.org (David B. Kopel) — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

This is the second part of Dave Kopel's report on gun control and race in America. The first article looked at the history of gun laws during the post-Civil War period.

Do minorities have a moral right—and even a moral duty—to resist mob violence? The history of black people in America over the past century suggests that doing so may be necessary in order to protect civil rights.

During the Jim Crow era of the late 19th and early 20th century, blacks often offered only minimal resistance to white rioters, who were often abetted by law enforcement officials. For example, In the Wilmington, North Carolina riot of 1898, a mob destroyed a black newspaper after taking offense at a newspaper opinion. Armed whites fatally shot 12 blacks. The leader of the mob was elected mayor.

In August 1900 in New York City, police joined an anti-black riot, often behaving more brutally than other rioters. The mayor, the police commissioner, and the courts covered up the officers' crimes.

The rioters in the extremely destructive East St. Louis riot of 1917 were assisted by the police and by the Illinois state militia. As historian Robert Fogelson recounts in his book Violence as Protest, the white rioters:

burned houses and, with a deliberation which shocked reporters, shot black residents as they fled the flames. They killed them as they begged for mercy and even refused to allow them to brush away flies as they lay dying. The blacks, disarmed by the police and the militia after an earlier riot and defenseless in their wooden shanties, offered little resistance.

Still, the Missouri legislature thought blacks a threat, and enacted a law requiring a permit to obtain a handgun.

In the Washington, D.C., riots of 1919, policemen refused to protect blacks from rampaging soldiers and sailors. After the rioters had been allowed several days without restraint, federal troops were finally called in suppress the riot.

When whites and blacks rioted against each other in Detroit in 1943, the police tried to "reason" with the white rioters (to little effect) and killed 17 black rioters. A report by the NAACP blamed the riot on the Detroit police's over-escalation of violence.

A 1947 report by the President's Committee on Civil Rights, assessing the contemporary problem of lynching, found that "Frequently state officials participate in the crime, actively or passively."

Black leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois, editor of the NAACP magazine Crisis, insisted that blacks stop behaving like helpless victims. He wrote with disgust about black people in Gainesville, Florida, who had acted "like a set of cowardly sheep":

Without resistance they let a white mob whom they outnumbered two to one, torture, harry and murder their women [and] shoot down innocent men…

No people can behave with the absolute cowardice shown by these colored people and hope to have the sympathy or help of civilized folk…

In the last analysis lynching of Negroes is going to stop in the South when the cowardly mob is faced by effective guns in the hands of people determined to sell their souls dearly.

A. Philip Randolph, editor of the socialist black magazine Messenger, agreed: "Always regard your own life as more important than the life of the person about to take yours, and if a choice has to be made...choose to preserve your own and destroy that of the lynching mob."

At a protest meeting held at Carnegie Hall after the New York City riot, one of the speakers, "Miss M.R. Lyons of Brooklyn," told the audience:

Let every negro get a permit to carry a revolver. You are not supposed to be a walking arsenal, but don't you get caught again. Have your houses made ready to afford protection from the fury of the mob, and remembering that your home is your castle and that no police officer has a right to enter it, unless he complies with the usage of the law; see that he does not.

Sometimes, as in Memphis, the mere presence of armed blacks constrained white police or mob behavior. In other cases, armed blacks were partially successful; during the 1906 Atlanta riots, according to historian John Dittmer's Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, although blacks "were unable to offer effective resistance when trapped downtown or caught in white sections of the city, they did fight back successfully when the mobs invaded their neighborhoods."

Other times, resistance produced heavy bloodshed on both sides. In July 1919, a black who had floated into "white" water near a Lake Michigan beach in Chicago was killed. Whites rioted, blacks fought back with rifles, and the police stood aside. Twenty-three blacks and 15 whites were killed in a week of rioting.

Michigan's law requiring a government permit in order to buy a handgun was enacted after Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black man, shot and killed a person in a mob that was attacking his house because he had just moved into an all-white neighborhood. The Detroit police stood nearby, refusing to restrain the angry crowd.

Indicted for first degree murder, Sweet was acquitted after a lengthy trial at which Clarence Darrow served as his attorney. Black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Herald vigorously defended blacks' right to use deadly force in self-defense against a mob.

Darrow summed up for the jury: "eleven of them go into a house, gentlemen, with no police protection, in the face of a mob, and the hatred of a community, and take guns and ammunition and fight for their rights, and for your rights and for mine, and for the rights of every being that lives. They went in and faced a mob seeking to tear them to bits. Call them something besides cowards."

In Tulsa during and after World War I, the police worked closely with the "Knights of Liberty," a group which wore masks and attacked blacks and union organizers. In the 1921 Tulsa riots, armed blacks protected an alleged black rapist from a lynch mob. A small white army, led by the American Legion and with the approval of the police and city government burned a one-mile square black district to the ground. As many as 200 blacks died, but about 50 whites also lost their lives in the riot.

The eminent historian John Hope Franklin wrote: "The self-confidence of Tulsa's Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flourished, and they simply had no fear of whites...After 1921, an altercation between a white person and a black person was not a racial incident...It was just an incident."

After the Tulsa Riots, Herbert H. Harrison, the president of the Liberal League of Negro America, told a New York audience that more white riots were possible soon:

I advise you to be ready to defend yourselves. I notice the State Government has removed some of its restrictions upon owning firearms, and one form of life insurance for your wives and children might be the possession of some of these handy implements.

In 1936 in Gordonsville, Virginia, an elderly black man and his sister, William and Cora Wales, shot a sheriff who had come to arrest Mr. Wales on false charges of threatening a white woman. The arrest was a pretext to force the Waleses to sell their property to the town, for a cemetery expansion. An enraged crowd of 5,000 grew outside the Wales's home. Roy Wilkins, a future head of the NAACP, reported what happened next:

There was a slight flaw in the set-up, however. The man and woman had arms and they were not afraid to shoot…The leaders of the five thousand…had numbers. They had machine guns. They had sulphur bombs. They had tear gas bombs. But the two in the house had rifles, shotguns, and perhaps a pistol or two. Not so good. Not half as good as one lone Negro with nothing but his bare hands…

The mob sent a request that the United States Marine Corps send some men from Quantico to take care of the Waleses. The Marines refused.

After night fell, the crowd threw a torch on the house, and shot the Wales as they were silhouetted against the fire. After the fire had cooled, souvenir hunters hacked the Waleses' bodies into tiny pieces. Wilkins defended the Waleses for standing up to the system after a lifetime of humiliating oppression.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new civil rights movement began in the South. White supremacist tactics were just as violent as they had been during Reconstruction. Over 100 civil rights workers were murdered during that era, and the Department of Justice refused to prosecute the Klan or to protect civil rights workers adequately. Help from the local police was out of the question; Klan dues were sometimes collected at the local station.

Blacks and civil rights workers armed for self-defense. Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas NAACP and publisher of the Arkansas State Press during the Little Rock High School desegregation case, recalls that three crosses were burned on her lawn and gunshots fired into her home. Her husband, L. C. Bates, stayed up to guard their house with a .45 semi-automatic pistol. Some of their friends organized a volunteer patrol.

After the Bates's front lawn was bombed, Mrs. Bates telegrammed Attorney General Herbert Brownell in Washington. He replied that there was no federal jurisdiction, and told them to go to the local police. "Of course that wasn't going to protect us," Mrs. Bates remembered.

State or federal assistance sometimes did come—not when disorder began, but when blacks reacted by arming themselves. In North Carolina, Governor Terry Sanford (who later served as an anti-gun U.S. Senator) refused to command state police to protect a civil rights march from Klan attacks—until he was warned that if there were no police, the marchers would be armed for self-defense.

Based in local churches, the Deacons for Defense and Justice set up armed patrol car systems in cities such as Bogalusa and Jonesboro, Louisiana, and within their spheres of operations succeeded in deterring Klan and other attacks on civil rights workers and black residents. Of civil rights workers killed in the South, almost none were armed.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a self-described "Second Amendment absolutist," grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where her father, a Presbyterian minister, was a community leader in the civil rights struggles. According to a Nov. 17, 2004, article in the Montgomery Advertiser:

During the bombings of the summer of 1963, her father and other neighborhood men guarded the streets at night to keep white vigilantes at bay. Rice said her staunch defense of gun rights comes from those days. She has argued that if the guns her father and neighbors carried had been registered, they could have been confiscated by the authorities, leaving the black community defenseless.

Reverend John Wesley Rice never crossed the dividing line between self-defense and aggression. One man who did, though, was Robert Williams, President of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP. In the mid-1950s, Williams began leading demonstrations against the city's whites-only policy at the city swimming pool. Ku Klux Klan death threats came by telephone. Thousands of people gathered at Klan rallies to denounce both Williams and Dr. Albert Perry, another Monroe civil rights advocate. Williams responded by chartering an official NRA gun club, and using it to teach black people how to defend themselves.

Civil rights volunteers, in groups of 50 a night, took turns standing guard at Albert Perry's house. They dug foxholes, piled up sandbags, and kept steel helmets and gas masks handy. They also stockpiled over 600 firearms.

On the night of October 5, 1957, a Klan motorcade approached the Perry house. The civil rights workers opened fire, having been told not to shoot unless necessary. As the writer Julian Mayfield recalled in James Forman's book The Making of Black Revolutionaries:

The fire was blistering, disciplined and frightening. The motorcade of about eighty cars, which had begun in a spirit of good fellowship, disintegrated into chaos, with panicky, robed men fleeing in every direction. Some had to abandon their automobiles and continue on foot.

Two years later, Williams began to advocate more than mere resistance to white attacks. On the steps of a courthouse, following trials in which two white men were acquitted of allegedly attacking black women, Williams called for black lynching of white criminals: "if it's necessary to stop lynching with lynching, then we must be willing to resort to that method."

Williams was suspended from the NAACP. He appealed to the NAACP's National Convention. The NAACP convention delegates upheld the suspension, and adopted a Resolution observing that Williams "suggested violence as a means of redress of wrongs and not in self-defense or rights of person and property."

The Convention also adopted a Preamble to the Resolutions Committee report, stating: "we do not deny but reaffirm the right of individual and collective self-defense against unlawful assaults. The NAACP has consistently over the years supported this right by defending those who have exercised the right of self defense…"

Daisy Bates, the Little Rock civil rights leader whose family was armed for self-defense with a Colt .45, spoke in favor of the suspension. The resolution suspending Williams and the addition of the Preamble language about self-defense were both adopted unanimously by the Convention. However, the delegates were voting according to the "unit rule," whereby the delegates from a given region would cast their votes in accordance with the preference of the majority of the delegates within that region. Press reports suggested that there had been 17 votes (out of 781) against condemning Williams, although, pursuant to the unit rule, the official tally was unanimous. There was no suggestion that any of the delegates had voted against the self-defense language in the Preamble.

Also speaking in favor of the suspension resolution had been Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. King predicted that mass non-violent actions—boycotts, marches, sit-ins, and the like—would liberate blacks, and "retaliatory violence" would not. At the same time, King distinguished Williams' call for lynchings from violence "exercised in self-defense." King described the latter type of violence "as moral and legal" in all societies, and noted that not even Gandhi condemned it.

The civil rights movement of the twentieth century is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest victories of non-violent protest in history. But avoiding aggressive violence does not mean submitting passively to thugs and murderers. As even the most committed civil rights advocates understood, self-defense is an essential human right; the effect, and often the intent, of gun laws was to take that right away from people who had no other protection. Civil rights triumphed thanks to people who were willing to put themselves in harm's way—and defend themselves while doing so.

Some citations for items in this article
Detroit riot: Walter White & Thurgood Marshall, What Caused the Detroit Riot? (N.Y.: NAACP, 1943). 1947 report: To Secure These Rights (N.Y: Simon & Schuster, 1947).
DuBois: "Cowardice," Crisis, Oct. 1916.
Randolph: "How to Stop Lynching," Messenger, Aug. 1919.
Lyons: "Negroes' Public Protest," N.Y. Times, Sept. 13, 1900.
Harrison: "New Yorkers Urged to Arm Themselves," Baltimore Afro-American, June 10, 1921.
Wilkins: "Two Against 5,000," Crisis, June 1936.
NAACP 1959 Convention: Gloster B. Current, "Fiftieth Annual Convention," Crisis, Aug.-Sept. 1959;
Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery, p. 461.

Civil Rights and Gun Sights

david@i2i.org (David B. Kopel) — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Do innocent minorities have a moral right—and even a moral duty—to resist mob violence? The history of black people in America over the past century suggests that doing so may be necessary in order to protect civil rights.

In August 1900 in New York City, police joined an anti-black riot, often behaving more brutally than other rioters. The mayor, the police commissioner, and the courts covered up the officers' crimes.

burned houses and, with a deliberation which shocked reporters, shot black residents as they fled the flames. They killed them as they begged for mercy and even refused to allow them to brush away flies as they lay dying. The blacks, disarmed by the police and the militia after an earlier riot and defenseless in their wooden shanties, offered little resistance.

Still, the Missouri legislature thought blacks a threat, and enacted a law requiring a permit to obtain a handgun.

When whites and blacks rioted against each other in Detroit in 1943, the police tried to “reason” with the white rioters (to little effect) and killed 17 black rioters. A report by the NAACP blamed the riot on the Detroit police's over-escalation of violence.

A 1947 report by the President's Committee on Civil Rights, assessing the contemporary problem of lynching, found that “Frequently state officials participate in the crime, actively or passively.”

Black leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois, editor of the NAACP magazine Crisis, insisted that black stop behaving like helpless victims. He wrote with disgust about black people in Gainesville, Florida, who had acted “like a set of cowardly sheep”:

Without resistance they let a white mob whom they outnumbered two to one, torture, harry and murder their women [and] shoot down innocent men…

No people can behave with the absolute cowardice shown by these colored people can hope to have the sympathy or help of civilized folk…

In the last analysis lynching of Negroes is going to stop in the South when the cowardly mob is faced by effective guns in the hands of people determined to sell their souls dearly.

A. Philip Randolph, editor of the socialist black magazine Messenger, agreed: “Always regard your own life as more important than the life of the person about to take yours, and if a choice has to be made...choose to preserve your own and destroy that of the lynching mob.”

At a protest meeting held at Carnegie Hall after the New York City riot, one of the speakers, “Miss M.R. Lyons of Brooklyn,” told the audience:

Let every negro get a permit to carry a revolver. You are not supposed to be a walking arsenal, but don't you get caught again. Have your houses made ready to afford protection from the fury of the mob, and remembering that your home is your castle and that no police officer has a right to enter it, unless he complies with the usage of the law; see that he does not.

Sometimes, as in Memphis, the mere presence of armed blacks constrained white police or mob behavior. In other cases, armed blacks were partially successful; during the 1906 Atlanta riots, according to historian John Dittmer’s Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, although blacks “were unable to offer effective resistance when trapped downtown or caught in white sections of the city, they did fight back successfully when the mobs invaded their neighborhoods.”

Other times, resistance produced heavy bloodshed on both sides. In July 1919, a black who had floated into “white” water near a Lake Michigan beach in Chicago was killed. Whites rioted, blacks fought back with rifles, and the police stood aside. Twenty-three blacks and 15 whites were killed in a week of rioting.

Michigan’s law requiring a government permit in order to buy a handgun was enacted after Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black man, shot and killed a person in a mob that was attacking his house because he had just moved into an all-white neighborhood. The Detroit police stood nearby, refusing to restrain the angry crowd.

Indicted for first degree murder, Sweet was acquitted after a lengthy trial at which Clarence Darrow served as his attorney. Black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Herald vigorously defended blacks’ right to use deadly force in self-defense against a mob.

Darrow summed up for the jury: “eleven of them go into a house, gentlemen, with no police protection, in the face of a mob, and the hatred of a community, and take guns and ammunition and fight for their rights, and for your rights and for mine, and for the rights of every being that lives. They went in and faced a mob seeking to tear them to bits. Call them something besides cowards.”

In Tulsa during and after World War I, the police worked closely with the “Knights of Liberty,” a group which wore masks and attacked blacks and union organizers. In the 1921 Tulsa riots, armed blacks protected an alleged black rapist from a lynch mob. A small white army, led by the American Legion and with the approval of the police and city government burned a one-mile square black district to the ground. As many as 200 blacks died, but about 50 whites also lost their lives in the riot.

The eminent historian John Hope Franklin wrote: “The self-confidence of Tulsa’s Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flourished, and they simply had no fear of whites...After 1921, an altercation between a white person and a black person was not a racial incident...It was just an incident.”

After the Tulsa Riots, Herbert H. Harrison, the president of the Liberal League of Negro America, told a New York audience that more white riots were possible soon:

I advise you to be ready to defend yourselves. I notice the State Government has removed some of its restrictions upon owning firearms, and one form of life insurance for your wives and children might be the possession of some of these handy implements.

In 1936 in Gordonsville, Virginia, an elderly black man and his sister, William and Cora Wales shot a sheriff who had come to arrest the Mr. Wales on false charges of threatening a white woman. The arrest was a pretext to force the Waleses to sell their property to the town, for a cemetery expansion. An enraged crowd of 5,000 grew outside the Wales’s home. Roy Wilkins, a future head of the NAACP, reported what happened next:

There was a slight flaw in the set-up, however. The man and woman had arms and they were not afraid to shoot…The leaders of the five thousand…had numbers. They had machine guns. They had sulphur bombs. They had tear gas bombs. But the two in the house had rifles, shotguns, and perhaps a pistol or two. Not so good. Not half as good as one lone Negro with nothing but his bare hands…

The mob sent a request that the United States Marine Corps send some men from Quantico to take care of the Waleses. The Marines refused.

After night fell, the crowd threw a torch on the house, and shot the Wales as they were silhouetted against the fire. After the fire had cooled, souvenir hunters hacked the Waleses’ bodies into tiny pieces. Wilkins defended the Waleses for standing up to the system after a lifetime of humiliating oppression.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new civil rights movement began in the South. White supremacist tactics were just as violent as they had been during Reconstruction. Over 100 civil rights workers were murdered during that era, and the Department of Justice refused to prosecute the Klan or to protect adequately civil rights workers. Help from the local police was out of the question; Klan dues were sometimes collected at the local station.

After the Bates’s front lawn was bombed, Mrs. Bates telegrammed Attorney General Herbert Brownell in Washington. He replied that there was no federal jurisdiction, and told them to go to the local police. “Of course that wasn't going to protect us,” Mrs. Bates remembered.

State or federal assistance sometimes did come—not when disorder began, but when blacks reacted by arming themselves. In North Carolina, Governor Terry Sanford (who later served as an anti-gun U.S. Senator) refused to command state police to protect a civil rights march from Klan attacks. When Governor Sanford was warned that if there were no police, the marchers would be armed for self-defense, the governor provided police protection.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a self-described “Second Amendment absolutist,” grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where her father, a Presbyterian minister, was a community leader in the civil rights struggles. According to a Nov. 17, 2004, article in the Montgomery Advertiser:

During the bombings of the summer of 1963, her father and other neighborhood men guarded the streets at night to keep white vigilantes at bay. Rice said her staunch defense of gun rights comes from those days. She has argued that if the guns her father and neighbors carried had been registered, they could have been confiscated by the authorities, leaving the black community defenseless.

Reverend John Wesley Rice never crossed the dividing line between self-defense and aggression. One man who did, though, was Robert Williams, President of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP. In the mid-1950s, Williams began leading demonstrations against the city’s whites-only policy at the city swimming pool. Ku Klux Klan death threats came by telephone. Thousands of people gathered at Klan rallies to denounce both Williams and Dr. Albert Perry, another Monroe civil rights advocate. Williams responded by chartering an official NRA gun club, and using it to teach black people how to defend themselves.

On the night of October 5, 1957, a Klan motorcade approached the Perry house. The civil rights workers opened fire, having been told not to shoot unless necessary:

The fire was blistering, disciplined and frightening. The motorcade of about eighty cars, which had begun in a spirit of good fellowship, disintegrated into chaos, with panicky, robed men fleeing in every direction. Some had to abandon their automobiles and continue on foot.

Two years later, Williams began to advocate more than mere resistance to white attacks. On the steps of a courthouse, following trials in which two white men were acquitted of allegedly attacking black women, Williams called for black lynching of white criminals: “if it’s necessary to stop lynching with lynching, then we must be willing to resort to that method.”

Williams was suspended from the NAACP. He appealed to the NAACP’s National Convention. The NAACP convention delegates upheld the suspension, and adopted a Resolution observing that Williams “suggested violence as a means of redress of wrongs and not in self-defense or rights of person and property.”

The Convention also adopted a Preamble to the Resolutions Committee report, stating: “we do not deny but reaffirm the right of individual and collective self-defense against unlawful assaults. The NAACP has consistently over the years supported this right by defending those who have exercised the right of self defense…”

Daisy Bates, the Little Rock civil rights leader whose family was armed for self-defense with a Colt .45, spoke in favor of the suspension. The resolution suspending Williams and the addition of the Preamble language about self-defense were both adopted unanimously by the Convention. However, the delegates were voting according to the “unit rule,” whereby the delegates from a given region would cast their votes in accordance with the preference of the majority of the delegates within that region. Press reports suggested that there had been 17 votes (out of 781) against condemning Williams, although, pursuant to the unit rule, the official tally was unanimous. There was no suggestion that any of the delegates had voted against the self-defense language in the Preamble.

Also speaking in favor of the suspension resolution had been Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. King predicted that mass non-violent actions—boycotts, marches, sit-ins, and the like—would liberate blacks, and “retaliatory violence” would not. At the same time, King distinguished Williams’ call for lynchings from violence “exercised in self-defense.” King described the latter type of violence “as moral and legal” in all societies, and noted that not even Gandhi condemned it.

The Klan's Favorite Law

david@i2i.org (David B. Kopel) — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

If you believe everything that Michael Moore says in Bowling for Columbine and his books, then you would think that "pro-gun" people are white racists, and that "gun control" would be a wonderful way to help minorities. But a look at America's past reveals what historian Clayton Cramer has accurately called "The Racist Roots of Gun Control."

After the Civil War, the defeated Southern states aimed to preserve slavery in fact if not in law. The states enacted Black Codes which barred the black freedmen from exercising basic civil rights, including the right to bear arms. Mississippi's provision was typical: No freedman "shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition."

Under the Mississippi law, a person informing the government about illegal arms possession by a freedman was entitled to receive the forfeited firearm. Whites were forbidden to give or lend freedman firearms or knives.

The Special Report of the Anti-Slavery Conference of 1867 complained that freedmen were "forbidden to own or bear firearms and thus.rendered defenseless against assaults" by whites. Or as a letter printed in the Jan. 13, 1866 edition of Harper's Weekly observed: "The militia of this county have seized every gun found in the hands of so-called freedmen in this section of the county. They claim that the Statute Laws of Mississippi do not recognize the Negro as having any right to carry arms."

Congress' "Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction" set forth the factual case for the need for a 14th Amendment to protect the liberties enumerated in the federal Bill of Rights. At the Committee's hearings, General Rufus Saxon testified that all over the South, whites were "seizing all fire-arms found in the hands of the freedmen. Such conduct is in clear and direct violation of their personal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, which declares that 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.'"

Despite the statutes, and at the suggestion of Reconstruction governors and other leaders, blacks often formed militias to resist white terrorism. For example, in June 1867 in Greensboro, Alabama, the police let the murderer of a black voting registrar escape; in response, a freedman who would later serve in the Alabama State Legislature urged his fellow freedmen to create a permanent militia. "Union League" militias were formed all over central Alabama.

The freedmen slipped from white control. One planter protested that his workers were "turbulent and disorderly," coming and going when they wished, as if they had a choice whether or not to work. The Union League, protested another ex-master, was advising freedmen "to ignore the Southern white man as much as possible...to set up for themselves."

The next spring, the Ku Klux Klan came to central Alabama. The Klansmen, unlike the freedmen, had horses, and thus the tactical advantages of mobility. In a few months, the Klan triumph was complete. One freedman recalled that the night riders, after reasserting white control, "took the weapons from might near all the colored people in the neighborhood."

The same dynamic existed throughout the South. Sometimes militias consisting of freedmen or Unionists were able to resist the Klan or other white forces. In places like the South Carolina back-country, where the blacks were a numerical majority, the black militias kept white terrorists at bay for long periods.

While many blacks participated in informal, local militias, most of the reconstruction governors set up official state militias that were racially integrated. Like many other facets of the reconstruction governments (and the racist governments which followed them), the integrated "black" state militias were corrupt. The state militias, which sought to protect the state governments and the election process, were frequently in conflict with informal white militias. Arms shipments from the federal government to arm the militias were often intercepted and seized by white militias.

Official or unofficial, the black militias were the primary target of the white racist resistance. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, the U.S. Senate advocate of racism for many decades, joined a "Sweetwater Sabre Club" whose members seized control of South Carolina's Edgefield Country from a black militia in 1874-75, and attacked a black militia at Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876.

In areas where the black militias lost and the Klan or other white groups took control, "almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless," wrote Albion Tourgeé in his 1880 book The Invisible Empire. (An attorney and civil rights worker from the north, Tourgeé would later represent the civil rights plaintiff in Plessy v. Ferguson.)

The Klan's objective in disarming the blacks was to leave them unable to defend their rights, a Congressional hearing found. Afraid of race war and retribution, whites were terrified at the mere sight of a black with a gun. As legal historian Kermit Hall notes, "From the southern white's point of view, a well-armed Negro militia was precisely what John Brown had sought to achieve at Harpers Ferry in 1859."

The Vicksburg white riot of 1874 typified the problem. According to a Congressional investigation, the whites conducted, "Unauthorized searches by self-constituted authority into private homes, searches for arms converted, as is unusual, into robbery and thieving...." The Congressional Report detailed one arms roundup:

One poor old man, half crazed, but harmless, sitting quietly in a neighbor's house, is brutally shot to death in the presence of terrified women and shrieking children. He gained his wretched living by hunting and fishing, and had a shot-gun. No one pretended that Tom Bidderman had anything to do with the fight, but he was black, and had a gun in his house, and so they murdered him for amusement as they were going from the city to restore order in the country.

The Radical Republican Congress observed the South with dismay. The Republicans intended to use federal power to force freedom on the South. One of the Radical Republicans' most important tools was the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which required states to respect basic human rights. While the vague language of the amendment has produced disagreement about exactly what is covered, the Congressional backers of the amendment seem to have intended, at the least, protecting the core freedoms listed in the national Bill of Rights. Announced Representative Clarke of Kansas: "I find in the Constitution an article which declared 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' For myself, I shall insist that the reconstructed rebels of Mississippi respect the Constitution in their local laws."

The earlier Freedman's Bureau Bill had also been squarely aimed at protecting the right to bear arms. The bill guaranteed federal protection of "the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms."

The Amendment was quickly emasculated by the United States Supreme Court in The Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank, The Supreme Court understood the social realities of the South. The Cruikshank decision gave the green light to the Klan, unofficial white militias, and other racist groups to forcibly disarm the freedmen and impose white supremacy.

One state at a time, white racists took control of government by using armed violence and the threat of violence to control balloting on election day. Freedmen and their white allies also resorted to arms. But white Republican governors were usually afraid that employing the black militias fully would set off an even broader race war.

The white South, while defeated on the battlefield in 1865, had continued armed resistance to Northern control for over a decade. When the North, an occupying power, grew weary of the struggle and abandoned its black and Republican allies in the South, the white South was again the master of its destiny.

In deference to the Fourteenth Amendment, some states did cloak their laws in neutral, non-racial terms. For example, the Tennessee legislature barred the sale of any handguns except the "Army and Navy model." The ex-Confederate soldiers already had their high quality "Army and Navy" guns. But cash-poor freedmen could barely afford lower-cost, simpler firearms not of the "Army and Navy" quality. Arkansas enacted a nearly identical law in 1881, and other Southern states followed suit, including Alabama (1893), Texas (1907), and Virginia (1925).

As Jim Crow intensified, other Southern states enacted gun registration and handgun permit laws. Registration came to Mississippi (1906), Georgia (1913), and North Carolina (1917). Handgun permits were passed in North Carolina (1917), Missouri (1919), and Arkansas (1923).

As one Florida judge explained, the licensing laws were "passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers... [and] never intended to be applied to the white population."

That gun control has a very unsavory past does not, in itself, prove that all modern gun control proposals are a bad idea. But it does offer reasons to be especially cautious about the dangers of disarming people who cannot necessarily count on their local government to protect them.

This Is Kerry On Drugs

david@i2i.org (David B. Kopel) info@reason.com (Michael Krauss) — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 00:00:00 EDT

For those who oppose the federal government's disastrous war on drugs, there are many things to dislike about the Bush Administration, not the least of which is its shameless—and dangerous—use of the war on terror to prop up the failed drug war and the accompanying $18 billion dollar bureaucracy. And there is no indication that four more years of a Bush presidency will offer anything but more of the same.

But anyone who thinks a vote for John Kerry means a vote for a more liberalized approach to drug policy should think again. Candidate Kerry's choice for Homeland Security Advisor, Rand Beers, is a seasoned drug warrior who has already shown his loyalty to the well being of the drug war, no matter how many lives it destroys, or how many narco- terrorists are enriched along the way.

There are currently several drug-warriors serving in decision making posts within the Bush Department of Homeland Security; ex-DEA administrator Asa Hutchinson is now Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security. And another ex-DEA chief Robert Bonner is Commissioner of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.

Beers' drug warrior credentials go way back. As he put it in a 2002 deposition, "I first began to work in the counter-narcotics area in 1988 when I was on the National Security Counsel staff."

More recently, before he quit his Bush White House position as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Combating Terrorism and joined the Kerry camp, he served in both the Clinton and Bush Administrations' as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs; the top cop and chief apologist for America's war on drugs in Latin America.

He is also one of the architects of "Plan Colombia," the multi-billion dollar militarization of the drug war in Colombia (which is now funded as part of the "Andean Counterdrug Initiative").

As Beers continued in his 2002 deposition, "There was a series of strategy developments dating back, in terms of my involvement, to a 1999 development of a regional strategy for the Andean region. I was involved in the development of that strategy, and I had bits and pieces to do with most of the further development from a variety of different positions."

The effects of Beers' proud achievement are worth looking at closely.

In 1996-'97, the Clinton Administration decertified Colombia as a "cooperating" nation in the drug war. To stave off trade sanctions against lawful industries and a loss of U.S. foreign aid, Colombia began U.S. backed coca-eradication efforts, including slashing and burning on the ground and aerial herbicide spraying of coca fields.

In 2000-'01, the U.S. cranked up financial aid to $1.3 billion and sent more CIA and Special Forcers "trainers" and civilian "contractors" to assist in further eradication and interdiction efforts. It has thus far been a smashing success...at destroying the livelihoods of subsistence farmers, which bizarrely enough, Beers considers a victory in the war on drugs.

In 2001, Colombian peasants claimed that the herbicides the U.S. was spraying made them sick; complaining of skin rashes and diarrhea. But Beers had his own theory as to why already poor Colombian farmers were complaining. "The individuals who are being affected by the spraying are being affected economically," he told reporters, "If the spraying is successful, it kills their incomes."

In its "Global Illicit Drug Trends, 2003" the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime credits U.S. eradication efforts with a 37 percent decline in Colombian coca cultivation between 2000 and 2002. The same report says this reduction came after a five-fold increase in Colombian coca production between 1993 and 1999.

At the same time as the 37 percent decline in Colombian coca cultivation, the UN report continues, "Combining the three source countries (Colombia, Bolivia and Peru) translates into an overall reduction of 22 percent of the area under cultivation between 1999 and 2002." In other words, a reduction of Colombian cultivation has led to increased cultivation in other areas.

In its 2003 narcotics control report on Peru, where the U.S. is also underwriting forced coca eradication, the U.S. State Department claims, "According to U.S. Embassy reporting, coca farmers received approximately $126 million from buyers for their coca leaf output in 2002. This total is only a fraction of the size of the total cocaine economy in Peru, which may equal 1.2 to 2.4 billion dollars or more annually (or 2 to 4 percent of Peru's GDP). Nearly all of the wealth derived from the cocaine economy accrues to narcotics traffickers and other criminal elements."

So while Beers was happily killing the crops (both licit and illicit) of Colombian farmers, narco-traffickers and the terrorists who feed off the drug trade continued to eat well, simply moving their operations elsewhere in response to eradication efforts.

The 2003 narcotics control report continues about Bolivia: "The successful reduction of coca cultivation in the Chapare (down 15 percent) was offset by a 26 percent increase in theYungas resulting in an overall increase of 17 percent..."

And in Peru: "Due to the potential for social unrest, forced eradication was limited to non-conflictive areas" which consisted of abandoned fields and parklands while "...the extensive presence of high-density coca cultivation in the Monzon and Apurimac/Ene river valleys remains a major concern."

In the odd world of the drug warrior, this too is considered a victory. In 2001, General Peter Pace, then Commander of the U.S. Southern Command (the U.S. military wing of the drug war) called Plan Colombia "successful" because drug producers are moving their operations elsewhere in Latin America.

We're just beginning to get a glimpse of the havoc this relocation of drug production can wreak on the civil and economic health of other Latin American countries, but Beers is ready to turn this, too, to political advantage.

In November of 2001 Beers took his "at any cost" defense of American narco-policy to a new level by attempting (and failing) to connect Colombian coca and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's largest communist terrorist group, with al Qaida.

Beers gave a sworn deposition in a lawsuit filed by Ecuadorian subsistence farmers in U.S. Federal Court against DynCorp—a private contractor carrying out aerial eradication in Colombia. (Arias, et al. vs. DynCorp , et al.)

The Ecuadorians claimed that herbicide sprayed over Colombia had drifted across the border and damaged both their health and crops. Beers argued that the case shouldn't go to trial because the fumigation program is vital both to the national security of the U.S. and the war on terror in Colombia, claiming "It is believed that FARC terrorists have received training in Al Qaida terrorist camps in Afghanistan."

The FARC—accurately listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department—have become wealthy and powerful off the Colombian drug trade through protection rackets for coca growers and traffickers, the production and distribution of narcotics and control of local coca base markets. Beers' theory seemed to be that starving coca growers also cuts off funding for the FARC.

In a later supplemental declaration, Beers recanted the claim of FARC terrorists training in Afghanistan, "I wish to strike this sentence. At the time of my declaration, based on information available to me, I believed this statement to be true and correct. Based upon information made available to me subsequent to the filing of the declaration, I no longer believe this statement to be true and correct."

Exactly what "information" Beers had available at the time of his false statements is a source of some mystery. "There doesn't seem to be any evidence of FARC going to Afghanistan to train," a U.S. intelligence official told UPI. "We have never briefed anyone on that and frankly, I doubt anyone has ever alleged that in a briefing to the State Department or anyone else." According to a veteran congressional staffer: "My first reaction was that Rand must have misspoke... But when I saw it was a proffer signed under oath, I couldn't believe he would do that. I have no idea why he would say that." The "starve an Andean peasant to save an American cokehead" policy Beers defends has done nothing to protect the national security of the U.S., but rather is creating new political instability and terrorist alliances that can only serve to help along narco-terrorism in the Andean Ridge. In Peru, the communist terrorist group Shining Path, mostly crushed by Peru during brutal civil war in the 1990's is reportedly making a comeback. Beers himself, while still serving in the State Department told a 2002 Senate, "In 2001 the Shining Path had a slight resurgence in areas like the Huallaga and Apurimac Valleys, where cocaine is cultivated and processed, indicating the remnants of the group are probably financing operations with drug profits form security and taxation services." A February 8, 2002 Stratfor intelligence brief reported that, thanks to an expanding alliance with Colombian drug traffickers and the FARC, "Shining Path is trying to re-build its numbers and weaponry by working in the heroin trade. Peru is poised to become one of the world's heroin producers.

According to the 2002 State Department narcotics control report, "There have been multiple reports of border crossings by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) into Peru. In 2002 there was the first report of gunfire being exchanged between FARC forces and the Peruvian National Police.

The 2002 report continues, "Organized coca growers (cocaleros) in Peru staged a number of large protests during 2002, which intimidated the GOP into signing agreements to temporarily suspend coca eradication in certain regions, as well as to include cocalero representatives in discussions on revising Peru's counternarcotics law." It also describes a new Peruvian political movement, Llapanchicc, formed in the Apurimac River Valley cocoa growing region to defend indigenous farmers against forced eradication policies.

U.S. drug policy has managed to create the first Peruvian indigenous political movement with the defense of coca growing as its central plank.

Bolivia, which over the past decade vigorously eradicated coca with over $1 billion in support from the U.S., was considered the lone Latin American success story by American drug warriors.

Until 2002, that is, when the drug war changed the political face of Bolivia and Evo Morales, a Fidel Castro clone and the candidate from the Movement Towards Socialism (SAM) garnered 22 percent of the popular vote in the Presidential race with the backing of Bolivian coca growers, only 4 percent shy of the winner.

In 2003, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada resigned and fled to the U.S. amidst violent protest. While the civil unrest that led to his leaving was partly due to income taxes and a natural gas export plan, it was also partly due to what columnist Robert Novak called, "The backlash to U.S.-sponsored coca eradication in Bolivia..."

In any event, what is undisputed is that coca cultivation is back on the rise in Bolivia, growing almost as quickly as anti-U.S. sentiment towards forced eradication policies. (Cultivation is up 17 percent in 2002 according to the 2003 State Dept. narcotics control report.)

If policy makers were tasked with making a plan to ensure widespread instability, corruption, lawlessness and a steady flow of illegal wealth for narco-terrorists, they would be hard pressed to come up with a policy more successful than that already in place in Latin America.

That American drug-warriors are already in place in the new Homeland Security department should be worrisome enough. After all, American style liberty and the bill of rights are generally viewed as pesky impediments to the drug war mission, and counter-terrorism as secondary to the well being of the bureaucracy.

But that the presidential challenger intends to place at the top of the Homeland Security bureaucracy a key architect and defender of a failed, cruel, destructive war on some of the poorest people on this planet is especially depressing. Those trying to decide who to vote for based on what the next four years of drug policy may bring will find themselves in much the same position as a Colombian subsistence farmer—somewhere between a rock and a hard place.