Day Five And No Help For New Orleans.

DAY FIVE since the New Orleans Levy broke, and still no help.

Let’s talk about help for a second.

From the Associated Press: NEW ORLEANS (AP) - New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday as corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out, cops turned in their badges and the governor declared war on looters who have made the city a menacing landscape of disorder and fear.

"They have M-16s and they're locked and loaded," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said of 300 National Guard troops who landed in New Orleans fresh from duty in Iraq. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will."

Brilliant, Governor. How do you tell the looters from the citizens who don’t want to be raped, murdered and robbed when your only tool is to shoot? How does 300 do the trick when you could have had thousands of good guys?

Appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America," Michael Brown, Director of FEMA said he "never thought I'd see" the lawlessness that has overtaken the city and interrupted emergency relief efforts.

Madame Governor and Mr. Director, please understand that some do have the kind of vision needed. I am not very surprised to hear that officials did not anticipate the numbers of opportunistic predators who come alive when they know no one will stop them. People who are on their best behavior while separated from us by a thin blue line might as well be murderers freed from their cells by open doors and no guards. They could be on their best behavior only until local armed resistance is underwater. They’ve always been there, Mr. Brown, just waiting.

They've always been there.

Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property . . . Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them. — Thomas Paine, Thoughts on Defensive War (1775)

Part of the affliction of Potomac Fever, the official disease of Washington, is that officials are out of touch with our realities. Officials could not see this coming?

We already know that help is 72-hours or more away. As I mention often, it's going to be more like days and days. Weeks to get services up, depending on the nature of the disaster, and probably even longer in this case. But Day Five with such violence is another issue. There could have been good planning such that the violence would be a much lesser problem. New Orleans' case of disaster and aftermath is a classic example of what happens when officials do not listen to constituents, evidenced by the degree of surprise of officials. (Is out of touch with our realities strong enough?)

On looting - used unwisely as a euphemism for all of the rapes, robberies and murders occurring - the best thing to do under looting sieges is to permit the looting: you have to choose the hill you want to die on if you can, and for now, the safety of persons is more important than toasters and microwaves. The looting may stop when supplies empty out, but the violent crimes will continue until stopped. 300 soldiers fresh from Iraq isn't going to do it.

New Orleans is the perfect case study to appreciate what can happen – what does happen – when armed resistance and civilian authority in general are neutralized as they have been with the flood which separates the citizens from their armed protection. Violent predators then have nothing to fear from unarmed citizens.

And that’s the key. Criminals do not fear police, but they do fear armed citizens.

At this point, the liberal gun-grabbers and terribly misguided officials (who are so surprised) still fail to see the main purpose of armed citizens, namely, neighborhood security because law enforcement cannot be everywhere. This is the case-study value of New Orleans. Mississippi doesn’t have this problem; their guns were not lost to flood.

The part that tells the story is the number of rapes and murders within crowds at places of refuge.

But then, would there be Shoot-outs? Chaos? A) An armed citizenry would probably not even see shoot-outs when the thugs understand armed resistance of equal or superior force, and; B) chaos is what you have now without armed resistance! If you believe that the soldiers arriving with M-16's will do any good at all, where is that same sense in appreciating an armed citizenry a whale of a lot sooner than five days?

Choose.

Officials need to understand what guns are all about. For us, it's about personal and neighborhood security with an authority we already possess. Reasonableness can prevail when the good guys have superior force, and in large numbers of individuals throughout a neighborhood.

For officials, it's all about mismanaging a crisis planning so as to be needed; political prestige. But that prestige vanishes when you have the chance and you bungle it. Day Five, and still no help. You blew it.

The key is to listen to constituents and to untie the hands of citizens to act in their own defense as a matter of official policy. Too often, it is officially discouraged, and the New Orleans' lawful guns' being underwater shows what happens when the citizenry is disarmed.

This case study should stand for a very long time in the minds of both officials and citizens as a lesson against freezing the People out of the disaster planning and aftermath process.

As I mentioned in a previous piece, police and fire personnel themselves may be stricken in time of disaster. In New Orleans' case, they are, as some turned in their badges because what they were defending was utterly lost and because of the futility in facing being outgunned. Their homes were drowned and destroyed along with everybody else’s, a component that some official didn’t anticipate. But a lot of EMS personnel understand the psychology. Citizen input, too, might have.

I can imagine that some citizen input was heard, but was it really? Officials do not need to listen to tesimonty out of courtesy, they need to act on our tesimony.

One of my greatest quarrels with our government is precisely that: how they freeze the People out of the planning process. The refusal to take our realities seriously. The refusal to plan and to actually anticipate disaster and its peripheral effects, such as a disarmament of the armed populace, just to be the go-to people.

The idea of Martial Law, for instance, which sweeps up the innocent with the criminal because officials can’t tell the difference, is a zero-tolerance policy of a sort, and runs counter to the citizens’ active participation in their own recovery. The idea of putting 300 soldiers fresh from Iraq armed with rifles doesn't impress me, but worries me on whether they can tell the good guys from the bad guys. An armed citizen can tell the difference, and doesn't necessarily have orders to shoot to kill. There is such a thing as middle ground where no one has to get hurt.

As we see, five days now into the flood since the levy broke, help is still not on scene. Choppers are shot at, which delays their arrival. Some choppers are effecting safe landings. Those shooters would be less of a problem over five days if a Minuteman sort of contingent were on scene or assembled from within the populace with a constant presence. Citizens already have the authority to do such in the public interest similar to the authority they have to give first-aid without being doctors. Necessity, a legal concept as an affirmative defense to tort, is a broad authority in cases such as these, not for looting, but for recovery.

But, nooo, officials won’t see the value of the Minutemen or the importance of other citizen involvement. It would empower the people and take some of that prestige away from the officials. Empowering the People means surrendering some of that prestige.

Now they have to take the heat for freezing the people out of the process, and the blame is entirely theirs.

In the planning process, the People need to keep their weapons -- you might say they need to keep their powder dry -- and there should be positively no instruction or policy which in any way interferes with any community’s individual use of those weapons, if necessary. That judgment belongs entirely to the individual on a case-by-case basis in peacetime as much as time of disaster and civil disturbance.

Cities should have their own contingency plans, period. Food, water, everything stored locally. Not a big deal. Earthquake-proof, waterproof, thug-proof. That's a lot of groceries, but good planning and citizen input could have made this disaster a lot less tragic.

For a policy of Martial Law which doesn’t care whether someone is killed in enforcing the peace(shooting looters), it’s likely a safer bet that individuals who have a better handle on life-threatening face-to-face situations may even save the lives of all involved with judgment instead of knee-jerk policy. As I said, they do not have orders to shoot to kill.

More citizen input, Governor. More control by local citizens, Mr. Brown.

It’s good for the country.

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John Longenecker is author of The Battle We Fight - Battling Potomac Fever To Recapture Our Homes And Communities available at all booksellers. His website is www.NationwideConcealedCarry.com