Earlier this week, CNN's Piers Morgan hosted a discussion on gun control. One of the panelists, Texas radio personality Ben Ferguson, said something that caught our attention.

While discussing the need for assault rifle firearms during a time of crisis as a result of a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, Ben Ferguson made an astonishingly ignorant and offensive statement:

Piers Morgan: In New York, I was there when hurricane sandy happened. Nobody felt a need to take an AR-15 to blow away looters. it wasn't like that.

Ben Ferguson: Were they looting?

Piers Morgan: There was limited looting.

Ben Ferguson: Don't act as if New Orleans looting was the same thing as what was happening on a beautiful place in New Jersey, with total different kinds of people. You had social economic issues - totally different.{C}

1. Yes. He really said that.
2. Ferguson apparently needs AR-15 to protect himself from "different kinds of people" during a crisis. What are these "different kinds of people"? Poor? Inner-city? Minority? All of the above?
3. What Ferguson and many conservatives still fail to understand is that the horrible looting and tragic humanitarian conditions in the aftermath of Katrina was not a result of the hurricane victims being poor, inner-city, minorities, or as Ferguson so eloquently puts it - "different kinds of people." The widespread looting post-Katrina occurred because because the federal government failed to provide basic order.

You don't need an AR-15 in a natural disaster, you need a competent President and a well-funded and functioning federal government ready to keep order and provide basic safety.

The difference between the aftermath of Sandy and Katrina wasn't the victims, it was our governments response.

Jay Newton-Small of Time Magazine says it was an issue of leadership, preparedness, and proper funding:

There was also a difference of presidential leadership. George W. Bush named his friend Michael Brown, a lawyer and former director of the International Arabian Horse Association, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. No one would make that mistake again. President Obama not only picked an experienced disaster management expert — Craig Fugate, former director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management — but one from a key swing state, just in case. The relative smoothness with which the government handled the storm also reflected FEMA’s high level of funding: a battle Democrats won in the wake of Katrina, insisting that emergency funds, like payments for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, need not be offset by spending cuts or taxes.