Better late than never.

It was one of the most laborious and disgusting clean-up jobs that had to be done after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Finally the Second Amendment Foundation has achieved satisfaction in its “clean-up” lawsuit against the city of New Orleans for using the hurricane as an excuse to grab guns from law-abiding citizens.

In September of 2005, the Foundation teamed up with the National Rifle Association to sue the New Orleans government for violating the right of innocent residents to bear arms. In the wake of Katrina, guns were grabbed without warrants, without even any probable cause or reasonable suspicion of crimes.

Just when people and their homes were at their most vulnerable, the forces of alleged law enforcement made it even harder for them to protect themselves against looters and other criminals.

It has taken three long years for New Orleans to agree to return the stolen weapons to their rightful owners. Alan Gottlieb, the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, says he is glad the suit is finally settled. But he adds that it should never have been necessary.

Gottlieb hopes the permanent injunction will “[send] a signal to mayors and police chiefs everywhere that we live in a nation of laws, and those laws are not subject to their whims.”

Natural disasters are no excuse to crumple the Constitution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The First Amendment recognizes some very basic rights:

• to speak truth to power, personally and through the press;
• to practice our religion - or not - as we choose;
• to associate with others and peaceably assemble together;
• to petition our government for a redress of grievances.

The Second Amendment, which recognizes our right to arm ourselves, means we - as individuals - may legally and practically secure the rights of the First.

Or does it?

The Amendment reads: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

A debate has raged over what these words actually mean. Does the Amendment support an individual right to be armed . . . or only when enlisted in a state militia? This makes a big difference for gun regulation and prohibition.

Now, in the case D.C. v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court has settled the issue. Voting 5-4, the court says Yes, the Second Amendment does enshrine an individual right to bear arms.

This makes perfect sense to me. That’s why the framers wrote “right of the people.”

Indeed, this is a wonderful victory for freedom.

It is also welcome news for Washington, D.C., residents who now, whether driving a cab or sitting at home alone, will be able to protect themselves. Which means, in the end, less crime and violence.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

There’s the real world, and there are representations of it.

I draw a picture of, say, a gun. That picture is of a gun; it is not itself an actual gun. It’s just a, well, doodle.

This being the case — that doodles differ from real threats — then why was a 13-year-old boy near Mesa, Arizona, suspended from school?

He drew a gun . . . on a piece of paper. He didn’t point it at anybody. He made no hit list, he didn’t say “Bang.” No one even got a paper cut.

But school officials treated it as a threat, lectured his poor father on the shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School, and suspended the lad.

The district spokesman insisted that the doodle was “absolutely considered a threat.”

But somehow, knowing that this student was suspended, I’m not feeling any safer.

If our teachers and administrators can’t distinguish real threats from doodles— doodles most boys do, doodles I drew when I was a boy â— then what are they teaching the kids? To overreact to everything? To not be able to distinguish small problems from big ones? To treat every symbol or representation as the real thing?

It’s elementary: the map is not the territory, the representation is not the thing represented.

You’d think, then, that teachers would be trying to impart (not erase) that notion from the minds of students.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.