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Especially when you consider Morial's own rhetoric. "We have been so focused here in New Orleans on getting guns off the street and protecting our citizens," he said at the press conference announcing the Oct. 30 lawsuit.

Something about New Orleans' gun policy seems markedly out of focus, of course, and not just the surface irony of its putting more guns on the street while trying to "get guns off the street."

The New Orleans suit, for instance, takes a consumerist approach to the issue of guns, arguing that the industry has the technology to make its guns safer, but it refuses to do so. The guns should have locks, the lawsuit states, and the guns should be making use of the high-tech options that use fingerprint ID and computer-chip technology to make sure that no one but the approved user can pull the trigger.

"Guns are sold without the means to prevent their use by unauthorized users, without advance warning which would prevent such shootings by alerting users of the risks of guns, and of the importance of proper storage of guns, and without other safety features," the suit reads.

Gun dealer Kiesler observes that "one of the reasons they said they were going to sue us was that we weren't providing gun locks." But on the 8,000 guns the city sent to Kiesler's company in Indiana, he says, only two were equipped with locks.

To hear Jannuzzo tell it, there's little difference between what Glock does and what New Orleans did. "We're an importer," he says, explaining that the Georgia office of Glock assembles, test-fires and conducts all warranty work on Glock firearms, but the guns are actually manufactured in Austria. "We distribute our guns to make money; [Morial] did it to save money. What's the difference?"

"That was kind of hypocritical," says Paul Bolton, of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "To say that 'guns are bad and terrible, guns are unsafe,' and then they turn around and instead of destroying they sell them -- it does seem to lean in that direction, of saying one thing in a lawsuit and then turning around and doing another thing."

The story first came out during a Jan. 27 confrontation between Jannuzzo and Morial on NBC's "Today" show. After a discussion of the New Orleans lawsuit, Jannuzzo -- in a last-minute snarky aside -- mentioned the gun swap.

Morial, for his part, tried to justify the deal by mentioning that, as part of the agreement, Glock had "agreed not to sell them in Louisiana."

And that was, in fact, part of the deal. Morial was apparently fine with these guns returning to the streets, as long as none of the streets had a Louisiana ZIP code.

Still, even that minimal pledge means little in reality. The April 8 New Orleans Times-Picayune contained an ad from a local gun shop advertising the sale of Beretta 9 mms formerly belonging to members of the New Orleans Police Department.

"Own a piece of New Orleans history," the ad said, "All are original duty weapons and are numbered and stamped N.O.P.D." The guns came with two 15-round "pre-ban clips."

Goyeneche says that the gun swap -- even with the Not-in-my-bayou promise not to resell in Louisiana -- was a joke. "Some of the weapons resurfaced at gun shops in the New Orleans area," he says. "They were sold from Kiesler to someone in Texas, who sold them to a shop in New Orleans. That's the folly of thinking you can stop these weapons from reentering your community."

Kiesler says that the five or so gun distributors that broker these deals offer different trade-in values for the guns depending on to whom they're permitted to resell them. "Say it's a Smith & Wesson model 686 revolver, which is a very popular gun," he explains. "We pay $200 if we can sell them to any lawful buyer. Now, New Orleans put in this thing with Glock so that the weapons could not be sold in Louisiana, so they would have gotten probably $175 on trade. Then the next level is if you can only sell the guns to other police departments, that would drop the value to $100."

After taking heat from the local press on this issue, Morial suspended the gun swap; according to Jannuzzo, New Orleans still owes Glock around 1,500 to 2,000 guns.

"Let's get to the bottom of it," Morial said in a news conference he called when local criticism of the gun swap grew deafening. "Were any weapons that should not have been traded, in fact, traded?" he asked. In March, Morial told the Times-Picayune, "Do you know whose idea [the gun swap] was? The Police Foundation's. But when the controversy came, they hid and left me to defend a controversy that basically started at the Police Department."

But the gun swap had all been done according to an agreement that Morial signed on Feb. 5, 1998. "It is our understanding your representatives [have] determined, based on a preliminary inspection, that we have a sufficient number of confiscated firearms to make this an even exchange, resulting in no monetary obligation to the City of New Orleans," reads the document, which bears the signatures of both Morial and Richard J. Pennington, the New Orleans superintendent of police.

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