Creating a ghost town

Has martial law been declared in New Orleans? If not, I am not sure how they can justify disarming citizens and forcing them out of their homes. Homes that are high and dry.

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Ten days ago, the water rose to the front steps of their house. Four days ago, it began falling. But only now is the city demanding that Richie Kay and Emily Harris get out.

They cannot understand why. They live on high ground in the Bywater neighborhood, and their house escaped structural damage. They are healthy and have enough food and water to last almost a year.

They have a dog to protect them, a car with a full tank of gasoline should they need to leave quickly and a canoe as a last resort. They said they used it last week to rescue 100 people.

"We're not the people they need to be taking out," Mr. Kay said. "We're the people they need to be coordinating with."

[...]

To reduce the risk of violent confrontation, the police began confiscating firearms on Thursday, even those legally owned.

To be sure, many of the thousands of people remaining in New Orleans want to leave, especially in neighborhoods where the water continues to stand several feet deep. Hundreds of people a day are being ferried to the convention center by National Guard troops in five-ton trucks and then bused outside the city.

Some holdouts may change their minds as their food and water run out. Some appear mentally incompetent or have houses in severely flooded neighborhoods and are staying in the city in the mistaken hope that they will be able to go home in a few days.

But thousands more do not fall in any of those categories. They are sitting on dry ground with all their belongings and plenty of provisions. They say they want to stay to help rebuild their city and maybe earn some money doing it, because they have animals they are afraid to leave behind, or to protect their property or simply because they have always lived here and see no reason to move their lives to a motel room in Houston or San Antonio.

Billie Moore, who lives in an undamaged 3,000-square-foot house on the city's southwestern flank that also stayed dry, said she did not want to lose her job as a pediatric nurse at the Ochsner Clinic in Jefferson Parish, which continues to function.

"Who's going to take care of the patients if all the nurses go away?" Ms. Moore asked.

When police officers arrived at her house to warn of the health risks of remaining, she showed them her hospital identification card.

"I guess you know the health risks then," the officer said.

I guess worrying about namby pamby questions about the constitutionality of all this is rather silly, given that the president has been given carte blanche to imprison citizens without charge or trial, but beyond that, why depopulate the city at this point? Why remove the nurses before they've removed the patients? Why force the city to ghost town status?

Won't someone need to clean up? Rebuild? Are they going to bring in guest workers? Do they (and by "they" I'm not really clear -- still -- as to who's calling the shots here, the incompetent mayor or the incompetent head of FEMA?) have a viable plan for rebuilding the city, or is the plan to decontaminate it, then decide what to do?

Perhaps the increasingly authoritarian weather we've been experiencing lately has me becoming a libertarian wingnut, but if I had provisions, a family and a house to protect, and dogs to care for, I'd be damned if I'd let them take my gun.

Especially if gun ownership became a right for some, but not others.

Mr. Compass, the police superintendent, said that after a week of near anarchy in the city, no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.

That order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom businesses and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property. The guards, who are civilians working for private security firms like Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16s and other assault rifles.

Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.

The silence of the NRA on this is deafening.

What is going on?