By: Teresa Mull

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell (D) has joined Champaign, Illinois Mayor Deborah Frank Feinen in exploiting the Coronavirus crisis to ban the sale and transfer of firearms.

GPM reported earlier this week that Feinen had issued an executive order declaring a coronavirus emergency in the city she governs and which has not confirmed a single case of the virus. The ordinances, The New York Post reports, “let (Feinen) ban the sale of firearms and ammunition as well as booze.”

Feinen told WAND-TV:

“So many of those powers, I have had from the beginning. All we have done is enumerate them and now the public is aware of them. So, I am the liquor commissioner. I can shut down bars yesterday, I could have shut them down two years ago. Nothing has changed with respect to that, it is just that we have laid it out, so people are aware of that. In respect to the other items that are listed in the attachment, they have been listed in the city code for 15 years.”

In a similar move, Cantrell announced she is “empowered, if necessary, to suspend or limit the sale of alcoholic beverages, firearms, explosives, and combustibles.”

The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), however, is telling Cantrell, “We sued once, we’ll do it again.”

SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb announced on the organization’s website:

“Following Hurricane Katrina, we sued the city when then-Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration began confiscating firearms from law-abiding citizens for no good reason. The federal court ordered the city to cease confiscations. “We sued New Orleans then, and we’ll do it again,” Gottlieb vowed. “The presence of a nasty disease does not suspend any part of the Bill of Rights, no matter what some municipal, state or even federal politician may think. “While we certainly recognize the seriousness of this virus and its ability to spread rapidly,” he continued, “treating Covid-19 and taking steps to prevent it from infecting more people has nothing at all to do with the exercise of the right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment. “People legally licensed to carry should not have their right to do so suddenly curtailed because some politician panicked,” Gottlieb observed. “We didn’t allow it before, and we’re not going to allow it now.”

Teresa Mull is editor of Gunpowder Magazine. Contact her at teresa@gunpowdermagazine.com.

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