An announcement that people will be "saved" at gunpoint:

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 6 - As a handful of pumps toiled to drain the water out of a sprawling city today, the New Orleans police said they would force the 10,000 or so residents left in the city to leave and Louisiana officials warned of long-term damage to the area's environment.

The police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, said police officers and other rescue workers going door to door would do all they could to remove every resident still in the city of nearly half a million, to protect them from lawlessness, get them to shelters and make sure children are fed.

"If that's necessary, we have the manpower to do it," Mr. Compass told CNN this afternoon about reports that they would force out people who insisted on staying in their water-logged neighborhoods. "We'll do everything we can to keep this city safe. These people don't understand they're putting themselves in harm's way.

"We're trying to save them from themselves," he said. "We're going to get the residents evacuated and then we're going to get all the criminals out of New Orleans. "

Here's Robert Tracinski:

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

(Via G. Gordon Liddy.)

But on the other hand, I'm wondering whether there's a connection between victimhood and the idea of helping people at gunpoint.

(To say nothing of building public housing in artificially drained swamps located below sea level.)