[There are two reasons your desire to carry a weapon is foolish in an area of high gang violence, and the first is obvious: they all have guns too. By carrying a weapon, you invite violence in an area where it is YOU who will be injured or killed if violence breaks out, because no matter how you slice it your .22 isn't going to protect you from the Latin Kings in west Chicago, if you need protection from them.]

Right, which is why I would demand the right to arm myself with a semi-automatic rifle, if that is what it would take.

[The second is less obvious, but no less pertinent: police are well aware that all it takes to start a gunfight is one shot, that's why they're trained to avoid shooting at all costs. The funny thing about guns is that if you have a gun and your opponent has a gun, it really doesn't matter if you're the good guy and they're bad; you're basically evenly matched. The 'single intruder or attacker' scenario doesn't apply most of the time in a city, but the 'collateral damage and casualties' aspect of a gunfight is most salient in densely populated areas. The largest city in existence when the 2nd amendment was written had less than a million people — keep that in mind when you advocate equivalent laws for totally different situations.]

Sorry, but I just don't buy it. If only the bad guys who will break the law anyway have guns, then the good guys will always be vulnerable. If I felt the need to own a powerful firearm to protect myself and my wife and children, then I would demand that right. And since I care about others' rights too, I insist on that right even though I do not personally feel the need to exercise it at this time.

[The guns were confiscated, as I understand it, because post-Katrina (when, may I add, an incompetent conservative government abandoned hundreds of thousands of the poor to their circumstances) was anarchic. Police and National Guardsmen were being shot at and killed by criminals taking advantage of the disaster. In an effort to de-militarize the disaster area, guns were declared anathema.]

This is hilarious on so many levels. First of all, if the National Guard was being shot at, then how exactly were the people abandoned by the government? Secondly, given that anarchy did temporarily reign, why in God's green earth would you take guns away from little old ladies and families while armed thugs who felt brave enough to shoot at the military were still roaming the streets? That is precisely the situation where the good guys need their guns the worst.

[Legally, these people have no standing. "State of Emergency" and "Disaster Area" confer the powers of martial law on the authorities trying to deal with the situation and remedy it. Now, were these people already in the Superdome who had their guns confiscated, I can't imagine any reasonable person thinking that carrying a gun into a room full of 100,000 people with no civic services would be a GOOD idea. ]

No, these were people living in homes that were not destroyed by flooding in the city.