The Washington Post waxes poetic concerning the confiscation of guns in Australia … er … When Australians Gave Back Their Guns.

When shootings occur in the United States, we Australians shake our heads. We do not have a Bill of Rights or a constitutional right to bear arms; here, the idea of ordinary citizens demanding to own guns without cause seems odd. So when one of our own is senselessly taken by boys who police said just wanted to be “Billy Bob Badasses,” it is aspecial affront.

It’s not necessarily a logical one: Lane was shot with a small-caliber handgun. Plenty of handguns are still legally held in Australia. About a million guns have been imported since the buyback, bringing private gun ownership here back to roughly 1996 levels.

But the real issue is availability.

Here, those who are licensed to own pistols are not allowed to carry their guns. There are strict, police-supervised checks of storage and security of the firearms, and buyers must prove a “genuine reason” to own a gun.

It has been estimated that if the United States had a buyback of similar proportions, about 90 million fewer guns would be circulating.

Philip Alpers, an adjunct associate professor at the Sydney School of Public Health and a specialist in firearm injury prevention, has documented that after the laws were changed, the risk of an Australian being killed by a gun fell by more than 50 percent. Australia’s gun homicide rate, 0.13 per 100,000 people, according to GunPolicy.org, is a tiny fraction of that of the United States (3.6 per 100,000 people). It should be noted that our gun homicide rates were already in decline, but the gun laws accelerated that slide.

In a 2010 paper, economists Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill found that the law change had led to a 65 percent decline in the rate of firearm suicides. Firearm homicides fell by 59 percent.

Causality is, again, hotly contested. But what cannot be denied is that 17 years ago, after a brutal killing spree, Australia had a rare moment of national unity, with overwhelming public support and bipartisan agreement on a public health policy that has saved lives.

A nation founded by convicts gave back their guns.

Speaking for Bill Bob Badasses everywhere, I’d like to say it’s nice to know that Australia has become a veritable Shangri La.  In more contemporary news, Sydney was the scene of a recent home invasion.

Police are searching for up to 10 men who were armed with knives and guns when they broke into a home and assaulted a man in Sydney’s south.

The victim, aged in his late 30s, suffered cuts to his head and was bleeding severely when emergency services arrived at his home on Minnesota Avenue in Riverwood on Tuesday night.

A five-year-old boy and a woman who also were inside the home at the time were not injured, but are believed to have witnessed the assault.

Police and paramedics were called to the home at 9.25pm after reports that up to 10 armed men had forced their way into the home and threatened the man with a gun.

No shots were fired during the incident, but the man was severely beaten. The offenders, who were all wearing dark clothing, then left the home.

Perhaps that was a part of Australia exempt from the gun control laws.