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There is EXTENSIVE sociological literature showing that people do not panic or become violent in the immediate aftermath of disasters. My research on Katrina turned up at least 1 instance where weapons almost caused violence: revue-rita.com/traitdunion9/s…
When I talked to the New Orleans Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness office in 2013 they had developed a mechanism of no-questions-asked deposit of firearms on the evacuation route, because NO ONE WANTS SMALL ARMS IN CROWDED SHELTERS...no one except the TX Leg I guess
I have personally responded to disasters in "dangerous" places like Sri Lanka, then in the midst of a civil war, and Indonesia, where the phrase "running amok" comes from. In none of these places did armed civilians start roaming around anarchically after disasters.
What I found doing research in the US was warlords - local sheriffs who stopped FEMA aid deliveries at gunpoint, diverting those supplies from their neighboring municipalities because they had decided they needed them more.
You know what aid workers don't want to deal with? More weapons.
and even after Katrina, in the highly militarized, partly lawless, dangerous context that is the Gulf Coast of the United States, most of the highly publicized stories about shootings and rioting turned out not to be true.
do people scavenge for food? yes, as well they should (it's likely to go bad anyway). Do they loot eg electronics? sometimes, but usually only before or after the full impact of a large disaster like Katrina. and in those circumstances your business has bigger problems
do people take advantage of post-disaster chaos to randomly attack other people who need to defend themselves with weapons? research says NO. It's far more likely that people spontaneously organize to work together.
and, as @DanielPAldrich notes, research shows that the people who panic and make harmful (for others) decisions as they grip their tacky wealth ever tighter are the elites afraid of changes in the status quo that rarely materialize. that is what TXLEG is doing with this bill
the classic citation for this is Clarke and Chess, Elite Panic 2008 academic.oup.com/sf/article-abs…
Kathleen Tierney has a good piece specific to Katrina in a 2008 book chapter, "Hurricane Katrina: Catastrophic Impacts and Alarming Lessons" in Risking House and Home: Disasters, Cities, Public Policy, Quigley & Rosenthal, eds.
All of this is of course in addition to research about how carrying guns doesn't make people safer but rather the opposite.
