Awakenings III.

Even the New York Times seems to get it (though I'm sure they'll forget very quickly):

Police and Owners Begin to Challenge Looters

The looters "are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas," Mayor C. Ray Nagin told The Associated Press, "hotels, hospitals, and we're going to stop it right now."

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said she was "furious" about the looting.

"What angers me the most is disasters tend to bring out the best in everybody, and that's what we expected to see," Ms. Blanco said at a news conference. "Instead, it brought out the worst."

All sizes and types of stores, from Wal-Mart to the Rite Aid to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop, turned into bazaars of free merchandise.

Some frightened homeowners took security into their own hands.

John Carolan was sitting on his porch in the thick, humid darkness just before midnight Tuesday when three or four young men, one with a knife and another with a machete, stopped in front of his fence and pointed to the generator humming in the front yard, he said.

One said, "We want that generator," he recalled.

"I fired a couple of rounds over their heads with a .357 Magnum," Mr. Carolan recounted Wednesday. "They scattered."

He smiled and added, "You've heard of law west of the Pecos. This is law west of Canal Street."

Read the whole thing.