Army Course Manual Trains Soldiers to Confiscate Constitutionally-protected Firearms

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
July 6, 2012

Police and military confiscated weapons in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

In addition to revealing how the federal government and the Pentagon will respond to civil disturbances – in violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act – the United States Army Military Police School’s Civil Disturbance Operations document instructs the military to confiscate weapons from American citizens.

Earlier today, Paul Joseph Watsonexamined how the military will be used to “quell riots, confiscate firearms and even kill Americans on U.S. soil during mass civil unrest.” The military course document outlines how military assets will be used to “help local and state authorities to restore and maintain law and order” in the event of mass riots, civil unrest or a declaration of martial law.

The document instructs soldiers to deny Americans – specifically, “rioters” and “dissidents” – the right to exercise the Second Amendment during a government declared “civil disturbance”:

A main consideration in the conduct of civil disturbance operations is to prevent liquor, drugs,weapons, and ammunition from falling into the hands of rioters. Therefore, liquor stores, drug stores, sporting good shops, pawn shops, and hardware stores are main targets for looters and must be kept under close observation by means of foot and motorized patrols. Normally, businesses of this type must be identified in advance and included in emergency plans. (Emphasis added.)

Moreover, the document instructs soldiers to protect “control force personnel and civilian dignitaries in the disturbed area” from the violent behavior of “radical or extremist elements” by denying access to “armories, arsenals, hardware, and sporting good stores, pawnshops, and gunsmith establishments, or other places where weapons or ammunition are stored. To conserve manpower, consideration may be given to evacuating sensitive items, such as weapons from stores and storing them in a central facility.”

In other words, during martial law or a government declared civil disturbance in reaction to “radical or extremist elements,” guns will be confiscated and held by the military.

In 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Police, National Guard troops, and U.S. Marshals confiscated firearms. "Guns will be taken. Only law enforcement will be allowed to have guns,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass declared as he prepared to violate the Second Amendment. The National Guard conducted warrantless house-to-house searches in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Katrina served as a beta test and was codified in course material the following year by the Pentagon and published in Civil Disturbance Operations document (released in April of 2006). The instructional document, however, does not use a natural disaster as a premise to confiscate constitutionally-protected firearms, but rather "civil disturbance planning" as did earlier documents under Operation Garden Plot, otherwise known as United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2.