Police in New Orleans Begin Confiscating Weapons

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08cnd-storm.html?oref=login
According to BugMeNot you can login to view the above with user: liarliar1234 and pass: password if you are smart enough to not already be registered).

But here's the important bit from the above article anyway:

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Waters were receding across this flood-beaten city today as police officers began confiscating weapons, including legally registered firearms, from civilians in preparation for a mass forced evacuation of the residents still living here.

No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.

But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16's 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.

Now, I understand that they are concerned with the possibility of violence when they begin forcibly evacuating the people who remain from the city. Its a valid concern, and when I first heard they were going to start doing that I said to everyone in the room watching TV with me "That’s when the shooting starts again".
But taking peoples legally owned firearms is not the solution.
Why? Because firearms are not the problem. They never are. People who do stupid or dangerous things are the problem, and firearms make it no easier for them to do those things. And wonder of wonders, criminals who want to use firearms will not obey any ban or comply with any confiscation program, because they are criminals and the law already has no meaning for them. It solves nothing.
What confiscating the legally owned guns from the citizens of NOLA will do is make them easier prey for the criminals, who didn’t turn in their guns and probably cant be found to be asked for them anyway. I'll go out on a limb here and assume that a lot of the people who were moving around in groups of armed looters have gone "underground" to abandoned buildings (of which there will be some amazingly fine pickings right now, from court-houses to out-houses) and are moving from place to place, avoiding detection, with their "posse" and piles of stolen big screens and PS2's.
NOLA for criminals right now is possibly the largest Temporary Autonomous Zone in the United States right now, definitely the largest in any urban setting (I can think of plenty of areas here in the Southwest U.S. where it could still be the wild west, but no one is exploiting the space and absence of control in any massive, or illegal, way as in NOLA). The TAZ, disconnected from the establishment and not really under the strict control of the government at any level, is an ideal place for criminal enterprise of all sorts. Oddly enough it may also be one of the last places in this world where a human being can be truly free.
However, survival in a TAZ as a non-criminal is dependent on the ability to bite back. Disarming people prevents them from being able to do that - no mans home is his castle when he has no way to defend it.
Now I realize that the disarmament is a precursor to forced evacuation, so it’s not like they are leaving these people there, but how long of a time period will there be between disarmament and evacuation? If its anything more than overnight, the citizenry will be at the mercy of those who still have guns. Namely the criminals, but lets not forget the behavior of the New Orleans P.D. in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, many of them took as much advantage of the TAZ as they could, looting right along side everyone else. Not every New Orleans cop did that, of course, but many of them did and there is now no good way to tell who did their job, and who disgraced the uniform. If there are still N.O.P.D. officers working down there, they are not to be trusted, I'm sorry. Cops are human too - those who do their job get my greatest respect, and some of them my friendship - but there are those few who have no honor, and damaged morals and ethics, and will do harm for their own gain or pleasure. I'm sure some of those bad seeds have gotten down there as volunteers, of all types (Medics, National Guard, Police, etc.) and all it takes is one.
Disarmament solves nothing and makes the people weaker.

I think the actual solution is to just leave people alone. Make a stronger evacuation effort, bordering on forced but with a strong backing of educating people about the dangers of staying (namely disease in the water, and thus on everything the water touched), and then those who still want to stay, let them. It is a problem that will correct itself in short order; they'll get sick and be all too willing to leave then. Or they'll die. Hate to be that way, but its nature at work - It shouldn’t be the government’s job to keep people alive beyond a reasonable expectation, and expecting the government to take care of you when you refuse to take care of yourself and leave a place like NOLA is far beyond reasonable.
But, if things were done that way, they wouldn’t have to worry about officers being shot at by people resisting removal. They wont have to waste manpower on the unwilling but demanding, or the insane and dangerous.
But of course... everyone is special, and entitled (so sayeth the government) so they deserve to be evacuated to safety whether they like it or not. The government knows what’s good for you, and being disarmed and left at the mercy of fate while you wait to be dragged kicking and screaming from your home is what’s good for you.