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I, too, have a wife and children. What message do I send them if I allow things like this? It's ok to knuckle under when it's MY precious hide? Or theirs? I think not.

I'm also an amateur historian, and a history & government teacher. I have a responsibility to teach the truth, and to model proper behavior. Not just to my family, but to my students as well.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

I cannot expect them to do the right thing if I will not, regardless of cost. I lived my life in the Air Force that way, I can't see any reason to change now.

You raise valid points.

Let's suppose that the "zero tolerance for confiscation" policy had been used by a citizen in New Orleans. Unless the media was there, and the recorded record clearly indicated that the citizen had died because he was refusing to cooperate with the confiscation order because it was unconstitutional, what we probably would have at that point is a dead homeowner (and maybe his family) filed under the "looter/gunman shot by law enforcement" category. We may well have had this happen.

Perhaps the LEOs would retreat in the face of threatened or actual resistance, but I doubt it.

If the media was not there, and there were no survivors on the homeowner side, then we have to depend on the LEOs telling the truth about the sequence of events. Perhaps a citizen might be prescient enough to prerecord his intentions to die resisting a confiscation order in a way that ensured it could not be suppressed, but I doubt it.

Otherwise we would have to rely on the surviving family members to tell the story later in court, or in the media, once they get out of prison/the hospital.

If real and lasting tyranny had begun, any statements by survivors, LEOs or the deceased that didn't fit the agenda of the tyrants would not be allowed.

In New Orleans, due to lack of electronic communications, there really was no way of getting the word out that armed resistance to confiscation had started, at least locally, except by word of mouth. I doubt that the authorities would cooperate in spreading tales of resistance, and dead men famously tell no tales.

As it now seems to be turning out, the New Orleans confiscation policy was a temporary and stupid overstepping of authority that will be redressed in court, and hopefully the the legislative and electoral systems.

I can't argue with your convictions, and I rather admire you for them.

I simply would not be willing to bet my life and the lives of my family that the illegal actions of local government during a natural disaster were going to snowball into a general imposition of dictatorship on a national level that would preclude redress at a later date.

If the circumstances were different, and there was, for example, a coup going on at the federal level, that might change things, and there could be a set of circumstances so horrible that would make me think it was time to sell my life and the lives of my kin at the highest price I could extract.

Resisting the stupidity and ignorance of a tin-pot chief of city police and his equally wrongheaded local political bosses just doesn't cross that threshold for me.