because everyone likes a good discussion about free will

Looting may have been rampant a few days ago, but I've never felt safer in New Orleans than I do driving around today. Such are the benefits of an occupying force. High-riding military vehicles and gun-toting troops blanket every block. Every so often, someone asks me to roll down the window and show ID before waving me on, but the soldiers mostly look like they're killing time.

Besides providing an excellent, scene-of-the-disaster look at the New Orleans wreckage, Josh Levin makes an important point today about the benefits of miltary occupation in a disaster zone. Just a few days ago, the area was, by many accounts, a minor warzone. But cover those streets with highly trained men carrying guns and the gangland brutes think twice.

What's more, this puts a fairly heavy damper on the idea that violent looters were somehow acting out of desperate humanity, unable to control themselves in their unhinged, disturbed situation. As soon as the troops arrived, the violence, for the most part stopped. Yes, there was an early incident on a bridge where Army Engineers were shot, but the troops guarding the engineers took out several of the gunmen, and since then, reports of the sort of anarchistic violence that seemed so prevalent in the early days of the disaster nearly disappeared. Clearly, these drug addicts and hooligans, who Mayor Nagin has tried continually to excuse (or at least play down), were able to control their impulses once the troops showed up. Why shouldn’t they have been expected to control them before?

To blame the government – or anyone other than the perpetrators – for the violence committed at the Superdome or around New Orleans, is fallacy. People are responsible for their own actions, and subsequently must be held accountable for them. If they can control themselves in the presence of a superior security force, then they ought to have been able to control themselves beforehand as well. To excuse reprehensible violence because of difficult circumstances is to remove these individuals of their free will, all for the sake of partisan blame-shifting.