Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

The Washington Post:

President Obama, addressing yet another memorial gathering after a deadly mass shooting, said Sunday evening that he senses “a creeping resignation” in the United States that homicidal lunacy like the Washington Navy Yard massacre “is somehow the new normal.” But he said “it ought to be a shock to us all” and should spur Americans to demand “a common sense” balance between gun rights and gun control.

“We cannot accept this,” Obama said of the Sept. 16 attack that killed a dozen people at the Navy Yard. “As Americans bound in grief and love, we must insist here today there’s nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work.”

Obama was addressing about 4,000 people, including loved ones of the slain, who gathered outdoors at the Marine Corps Barracks at Eighth and I streets SE, a few blocks from the Navy Yard. The president did not vow to throw the weight of his presidency behind an effort to enact gun-control legislation, as he did in December at a memorial service after the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Instead, he urged the nation to demand such measures.

He used a shotgun – a gun most often used in America for hunting Turkey and water fowl.

Uh huh.  Did the Syria “crisis” evaporate Mr. Obama?  Do you need another crisis to deflect attention from the horrible economy and impending doom of Obamacare implementation?  Do you want people to waste their time figuring out how to make shotguns illegal instead of how to handle the clouds of economic meltdown on the horizon?

Move on.  Nothing to see here, go look at … yea, that’s it … guns again.

We’ve seen how the Department of Homeland Security has pressed for biometric identification of American citizens, and how American police have adopted COIN tactics, techniques and procedures in the policing of America, including more than seventy federal agencies.  These are cogs in a larger machine.  In an event that went completed ignored in the Main Stream Media (ignored, not missed), Wikileaks recently released 249 important documents on global intelligence contractors.

Today, Wednesday 4 September 2013 at 1600 UTC, WikiLeaks released ‘Spy Files #3′ – 249 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors. These documents reveal how, as the intelligence world has privatised, US, EU and developing world intelligence agencies have rushed into spending millions on next-generation mass surveillance technology to target communities, groups and whole populations.

WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange stated: “WikiLeaks’ Spy Files #3 is part of our ongoing commitment to shining a light on the secretive mass surveillance industry. This publication doubles the WikiLeaks Spy Files database. The WikiLeaks Spy Files form a valuable resource for journalists and citizens alike, detailing and explaining how secretive state intelligence agencies are merging with the corporate world in their bid to harvest all human electronic communication.”

WikiLeaks’ Counter Intelligence Unit has been tracking the trackers. The WLCIU has collected data on the movements of key players in the surveillance contractor industry, including senior employees of Gamma, Hacking Team and others as they travel through Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brazil, Spain, Mexico and other countries.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ publisher, stated: “The WikiLeaks Counter Intelligence Unit operates to defend WikiLeaks’ assets, staff and sources, and, more broadly, to counter threats against investigative journalism and the public’s right to know.”

Documents in Spy Files #3 include sensitive sales brochures and presentations used to woo state intelligence agencies into buying mass surveillance services and technologies. Spy Files #3 also includes contracts and deployment documents, detailing specifics on how certain systems are installed and operated.

Internet spying technologies now being sold on the intelligence market include detecting encrypted and obfuscated internet usage such as Skype, BitTorrent, VPN, SSH and SSL. The documents reveal how contractors work with intelligence and policing agencies to obtain decryption keys.

The documents also detail bulk interception methods for voice, SMS, MMS, email, fax and satellite phone communications. The released documents also show intelligence contractors selling the ability to analyse web and mobile interceptions in real-time.

Analysis & Commentary

An important reddit comment follows this up.

Would you like to know more?

Revolution in Military Affairs

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_in_Military_Affairs

Former DoD analyst Franklin Spinney

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_C._Spinney

“At the core of the RMA is a radical hypothesis that would cause Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and George Patton to roll over in their graves. That is, that technology will transform the fog and friction of combat – the uncertainty, fear, chaos, imperfect information which is a natural product of a clash between opposing wills – into clear, friction-free, predictable, mechanistic interaction.”

Project for the New American Century

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

In its “Preface”, in highlighted boxes, Rebuilding America’s Defenses states that it aims to:

ESTABLISH FOUR CORE MISSIONS for the U.S. military:

1. Defend the American homeland;
2. Fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;
3. Perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions;
4. Transform U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs”;

CONTROL THE NEW “INTERNATIONAL COMMONS” OF SPACE AND “CYBERSPACE”

Section V of Rebuilding America’s Defenses, entitled “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force”, includes the sentence: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor” (51).[15]

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. ”

-Zbigniew Brzezinski, geopolitician, former US National Security Advisor, and member of the Bilderberg Group. Quote lifted from his book “Between Two Ages”

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski

It’s a brave new world that the rulers envision, no doubt.  No more conventional warfare, not even fourth generation warfare since the rulers know what we’re doing, who we are, where we are, what assets we have, to whom we’re connected, and how to stop “trouble-making” before it gets started.  Iraq was a laboratory for stability operations, and the story about the “snake-eaters” using a synthesis of organic intelligence, signals intelligence and smart analysis and finding the bad guys in order to end the insurgency only plays into the hands of the collectivists.  But can it really work like this?

The narrative about the “snake eaters” bringing an end to the campaign in Iraq is greatly overblown.  It was primarily the U.S. Marines who brought stability to the Anbar Province, and it was the hard work of thousands of Soldiers in the balance of Iraq that brought the modicum of success that we had in Iraq, for what end I don’t really know.

The Chicago police department cannot even stop gang violence in their own city, and the Governor is considering the use of National Guard troops to quell the violence.  It won’t work, and I seriously doubt that such troops would even be under arming orders, any more than the National Guard sent to the Southern border were under arming orders.

There is another intersection of this paradigm with collectivist intentions.  In order to find money for redistribution to the masses, they need to gut the military.  Notwithstanding the ongoing debate in our community over a standing army, the point is that the collectivists are going after money, and before they target 401Ks and IRAs, they willl use defense dollars in their designs for control.  It’s easier for them that way.

But this is all well and good for the rulers until the bullets start flying.  Obamacare was and continues to be a big deal.  Confiscation of 401Ks and IRAs might be the event that pushes typical Americans over the edge.  Watching the death of loved ones due to decisions by government death panels (while their wealth goes to funding the medical care of illegal aliens) might be another.

In the end, the hives the government has created (like Chicago) don’t work because they undermine values and the organic family unit.  Whatever the final straw, if the government cannot control violence in the very hives that they’ve created, they certainly can’t accomplish that in suburbia America, where fences, yard dogs and guns every fifty yards would make the hedgerows in Normany look like inviting terrain.

To be sure, the degree of electronic control over Americans makes the situation hard, and the government knows almost everything about us.  But for the Bilderberg group and the elitist rulers, I have a suggestion.  Try a test case in which you announce gun and wealth confiscations, and send one of the many federal policing agencies up Highway 276 in South Carolina, through Marietta, and turn left on Highway 11.  Within a few minutes make a turn to the right towards Jocassee Gorges, and start your confiscations up in those hills.  My bet is that the your vehicles will be blown to smithereens.  If you do make it up the road, it’s likely that they boys with scoped, bolt action hunting rifles will make life very difficult for you.  With all due respect to the tactical trainers (which training is very good and necessary, I’m sure), there won’t be small unit maneuver warfare.  No one will ever see the boys hiding behind the trees.  They won’t go on the run as a lone wolf because you won’t ever know they were involved in anything.  The best planning, the best troops and the best equipment couldn’t handle an insurgency in America – if one ever develops.

Or try to do confiscations in Murphy, North Carolina, or any one of a multitude of places in Idaho or Montana.  To be reminded of the value of a good rifleman, I strongly recommend an article in the most recent American Rifleman magazine (October 2013).  Sometimes this publication becomes annoying with its advertizing and product reviews.  But occasionally the magazine crafts a winner, and this one is meets the criteria.

The article is entitled “Where will we bury them all?,” and in my paper copy it begins on page 95.  It’s the story about the communist invasion of Finnland in 1939, and the value of basic combat rifles and good fieldcraft.  It summarizes:

The winter war proved a costly victory for the Soviets.  The Red Army lost approximately 126,875 dead or missing, 264,908 wounded and appriximately 5,600 captured.  In addition, they lost about 2,268 armored vehicles.  The Finns suffered greatly to preserve their freedom.  In the four months of combat, Finnish losses numbered approximately 26,662 dead and more than 39,000 wounded.  A tiny nation of riflemen had held off the communist Red giant.

It would be easy to conclude that the 50% of America which is still working is on a direct collision course with the elitist rulers.  It would be just as easy for the collectivists to conclude that biometrics, numbers, cards, decryption, cameras and aggressive policing will enable their designs.  The former conclusion seems more likely every day.  The later conclusion seems dangerous for the collectivists.

Of course, everything in this article is for educational purposes only.

Concerning the recent shooting in Chicago:

The perpetrators of a late-night attack in a southwest Chicago park in which 13 people were wounded, including a three-year-old, used an assault-style weapon to spray the crowd with bullets, making it “a miracle” no one was killed, the city’s police superintendent said on Friday.

Ballistics evidence shows that those behind Thursday night’s attack used a 7.62mm rifle fed by a high-capacity magazine, police superintendent Garry McCarthy told reporters. That type of weapon, McCarthy said, belongs on a “battlefield, not on the street or a corner or a park in the Back of the Yards”, the neighborhood where the shooting took place.

“It’s a miracle in this instance that there have been no fatalities based upon the lethality of the weapon used at the scene,” McCarthy said, calling on lawmakers to restrict the sale of such weapons and choke off the flow of illegal guns into the city.

Bah.  Ballistics evidence can’t demonstrate one way or another whether the gun had a high-capacity magazine, and a .308 shot from distance using a high powered scope and bolt action rifle would have proven to be more lethal.

But the chief of police has some words of wisdom for us.

“Illegal guns, illegal guns. Illegal guns drive violence.”

Strange, that.  I thought they said it was gang related violence?  The mere fact that there are guns around “drives” violence, we are led to believe.  I have a physician friend who went on a mission trip to Haiti a couple of years ago, and other than Scabies (which he was unprepared to treat because he didn’t carry the medications for it), the most common injury or sickness with which he dealt was machete wounds – deep wounds.  The gangs walk around taking things from people and swinging machetes.

Machetes, hammers, baseball bats, and in the Far East, acid thrown in the eyes of victims (according to one close friend who spent several years in Hong Kong).  Things don’t drive violence.  Evil in the heart of mankind drives violence.  You can’t ameliorate evil by banning guns.  You can only be prepared to deal with it when it happens.

I recently heard an interview with the base commander at the Navy Yard in Washington speak to the issue of how it feels to be defenseless in the face of an active shooter.  What bothered me most was the cavalier way in which he approached the subject.  Twelve people perished today, not including the shooter, and the sad part is that it didn’t have to happen.  David Codrea gives us his initial thoughts on one of the root causes.

… one fact is indisputable. The killer(s) took advantage of a “gun free zone” at not only the facility, but one that extends throughout Washington. D.C.

Security at the center utterly failed at stopping a murderer bent on killing defenseless personnel. And even acknowledging special security conditions at a military installation, in the absence of a special legal relationship the government has no duty to provide protection to people it prevents from protecting themselves, meaning there is no attendant liability should they fail to do so.

“Special security conditions” will never stop a determined shooter, and it didn’t in this case.  The folks are defenseless, and they have been made that way intentionally and with malice of forethought.  It’s the same way in church worship services.

HOLYOKE, Mass. (AP) — Holyoke police are looking for a man they say interrupted a church service and robbed several members of the congregation at gunpoint.

Lt. James Albert says the masked suspect entered the Pentecostal church at about 2 p.m. Sunday, announced the robbery, and took personal items, including cellphones, from several of the roughly 20 worshippers.

The fact that he stole from them rather than killed them is a blessing and a second chance.  They should never voluntarily be in a gun free zone (or a gun free state) if they have any other choice.

But leave it to the progressives to learn the wrong lessons.

Gun enthusiasts say it is inappropriate to talk about gun violence at the time it occurs. Better to wait … and wait … and wait … until time has passed, and the weeping next of kin have vanished from TV, and it’s safe to return to business as usual. The idea of the gun enthusiasts is that the way to show respect for the victims of gun violence is to do everything possible to multiply their number … better mental-health provision would contribute to the reduction of gun massacres. But America’s uniquely grisly record of gun death cannot be addressed without addressing guns.

I don’t know his state of mind, and thus I don’t know if David Frum really believes his propaganda that making guns illegal will stop the perpetration of crimes, or if he’s just too invested in his idiotic notions to turn back now, or if he is a full-orbed totalitarian.  But Frum wants to discuss guns, and wants to do it right now.

Very well.  I’m okay with that.  Here’s a note to Frum.  If you or your ilk ever try to take away my guns, I’ll use them to ensure that you don’t.  There.  I’m glad we had that conversation.  Tell me if you want to talk again.

Concerning the Colorado recall:

In an emotional concession speech, Mr. Morse called the loss of his seat “purely symbolic” and defended the record of the last legislative session as “phenomenal.”

“We made Colorado safer from gun violence,” he said afterward, as his supporters trickled away from a hotel ballroom here in his district. “If it cost me my political  career, that’s a small price to pay.”

[ … ]

Mr. Morse’s hand was on the tiller during much of that debate. A former police chief, he said he found himself in a position of not just rounding up votes, but actually explaining the mechanics of guns to fellow Democrats. He brought a magazine to show his colleagues how it worked. In an emotional speech in March, as the debate reached its peak, Mr. Morse stood on the Senate floor and spoke of gun violence and “cleansing a sickness from our souls.”

I had followed the Colorado recall elections for the simple reason that some of my readers forced me to.  But this is the first time that I have seen the theological undertones in the debates.  Now, take note how people like me, conservative Christians, are repeatedly mocked in the national discourse.  Trotting out our religion, we always are.  Forcing it on other people.  It’s incorrigible – they cannot help but mock us.

While it’s true that I do see theological issues surrounding the right and duty of self defense, it is Morse who forced his views into the law-making proces.  I never demanded the freedom to do such a thing.  For instance, while I see the historical and interpretive value of knowing that colonial citizens were required to own weapons, I do not support such a thing today.

Note his language.  He believes that his actions were “cleansing a sickness from our souls,” and he is willing to sacrifice himself in a vicarious sort of way in order to effect this redemption.  Good grief.  Morse thinks he is Jesus.

I thank God that I have been spared such theological confusion (does that make me sound like a Pharisee?).  If I ever declare myself to be Jesus, I think my astute readers will hold me accountable.

UPDATE: David Codrea doubts that anyone else wants to be Jesus.

While the successful recall will not be enough to shift the legislative balance of power in Colorado, it will no doubt show activists there and elsewhere what is possible when they apply themselves, and give a boost of confidence to retry recalls in efforts where not enough signatures were gathered, or to start new efforts where success seems possible. And it will no doubt energize gun owners to participate in the next election … Fear of that unpleasantness may be enough to rein in legislators seeing gun owners realizing a newly-discovered power. At the very least, recall actions can cause anti-gun politicians and their patrons to use up their resources defensively, as opposed to launching new aggressive campaigns against gun ownership …

Yes.  This is a battlefield victory.  But there are more battles to fight.  We’re just beginning.

Fox4kc.com:

The Missouri state legislature is trying to accomplish something that’s never been done: pass a law that will not only let residents own a machine gun, but also arrest federal agents if they try to take it away.

According to CNN, the Missouri Governor’s press secretary said there is a small provision in House Bill 436 that would make this possible, although it’s unlikely.

Meh.  I doubt that the Missouri legislature has the balls to do it, and even if they do, they won’t pass it with enough votes to override a veto.  Furthermore, since the state police report to the Governor, and since Governor Nixon is a collectivist, he won’t use the power of the state police to enforce such a law.  The next step in Missouri is replacement of their sorry-ass governor.

But it’s nice to dream, no?  I’m still waiting for the first federal marshall or ATF agent to be arrested and thrown in with the general prison population for enforcement of unconstitutional gun laws.  One day.

Lily Tang Williams writing at National Review has a must read column entitled Guns Against Tyranny.  It has become almost amusing to watch as the collectivists hyperventilate over claims that we make about right to guns having nothing to do with hunting, and everything to do with ameliorating tyranny.  But what Ms. Williams has to say is sobering and gives existential and emotional import to what is for us sometimes all about doctrine.

I was born in Chengdu, China. When I was growing up, the Communist Party controlled everything. There were no choices of any sort. We were all poor except the elite. The local government rationed everything from pork to rice, sugar, and flour because there were not enough supplies. We were allowed only a kilogram of pork per month for our family of five. We lived in two rooms, without heat in the winter. I got impetigo during the cold, humid winters. There were eight families living around our courtyard, and we all had to share one bathroom (a hole in the ground) for males, one for females. We had only government-run medical clinics, where the conditions were filthy and services were horrible. I was afraid of going there because I might get some other infectious diseases.

As children, we were brainwashed in school every day. We chanted daily: “Long Live Chairman Mao, Long Live the Communist Party.” I loved Chairman Mao. I was so brainwashed that I could see Chairman Mao in the clouds and fire. He was like a god to me. The powerful government watched us very closely, from the Beijing central government to our Communist block committees and local police stations. We had no rights, even though our constitution said we did.

It was frightening that local police could stop by our home to pound on the doors at night and search us for no good reason. People were arrested without court papers and locked up for months without trials.

Citizens were not allowed to have any guns or they would be put into prison, or worse. Chinese people were helpless when they needed to defend themselves. I grew up with fear, like millions of other children — fear that the police would pound on our doors at night and take my loved ones away, fear that bad guys would come to rob us. Sometimes I could not sleep from hearing the screaming people outside.

There were many stories of local people defending themselves with kitchen knives and sticks. Women were even more helpless when they were attacked and raped. I was molested as a college student once while walking home at night. It was common then.

When it came to dealing with the Chinese government and police brutality, there was nothing we could do. They had guns, while law-abiding citizens did not.

And thus does it go in collectivist hives where the government controls even your right to self defense.  The power brokers couldn’t care less whether the people can ensure their safety – they care merely about subjugation of the common people under the yoke of bondage.  Ms. Williams eventually made it to the U.S., and has this important observation.

I tried so hard to come to the U.S. for personal freedom, including the freedom guaranteed by the Second Amendment: the right to keep and bear arms, which makes me feel like a free person, not a slave. I felt empowered when I finally held my own gun. For the first time in my life, I truly knew I was free.

I think the Founding Fathers of this country were very wise. They put that in the Constitution because they knew that a government could become either powerful or weak and that the citizens’ last defense is the ability to bear arms to protect themselves against tyranny and criminals. The guns are not just for sports, hunting, and collecting; it is our fundamental right to bear arms and use them for our self-defense.

Having previously lived under a tyranny, it seems clear to me that the U.S. government is going to try to infringe my Second Amendment right. What happened in China could happen in America. If the government can tell us what arms to bear, where to bear them, and how many shots you need to use to defend yourself, we might just become slaves.

It’s already happened, Ms. Williams.  And if you haven’t noticed, at any time your local police department – or any of a multitude of federal departments – could send in a SWAT team on a misguided mission, destroy your home, kill your beasts in front of you, endanger your family and even kill members of your family, and no court in the land will hold them accountable for so much as the misdemeanor of littering.  We are already headed down the path about which you warn because they don’t care about the Fourth Amendment.

And that’s what makes the Second Amendment so important, no?  And it means that eventually we must be willing to act on our own behalves because they won’t.

David Codrea:

Two women have been brutally gang raped “by a group of 10 to 12 black male juveniles” in a Wilmington, Del. park, CBS Philly reported yesterday. “According to police, the suspects, who range in age from 12 to 17-years-old, remain on the loose.”

Councilmember-at-large Maria Cabrera was quick to size up the content of their character and state the obvious.

“The new criminal we’re seeing, they’re bold, they’re brazen, and they have a total disregard for life,” Cabrera admitted.

Continue to read David’s piece to see what remedy Cabrera advocates (hint: it is ostensibly religious based, but since it relies on statist solutions her religion is collectivism).

I document instances of morally obscene advocacy for going to the extreme even of allowing your own children to be killed rather than take another life, which is presumably the opposite of statism but with the same theme of religious-based malfeasance concerning protection of man’s life.

A New Yorker gives us his view of gun control, and it’s worth reading.

“I tell the kid I don’t want no trouble. I open the door to start getting out. But then I make a big mistake. When he reaches through the window to grab my keys, I grab the keys before he can get them.

“He says, ‘I’m gonna pop you, man!’ I look into his eyes and they’re black as death. Then BOOM!

“The next thing I know, I wake hooked up to all kind of wires in the hospital and the doctor is telling me how lucky I am. The bullet hit me in the right shoulder and passed out the left armpit — just missing my heart.

“That was three years ago, but I’m OK now. I guess it wasn’t my time to go.”

I was spellbound by his story and the matter-of-fact way he told it, but his story grew more fascinating when he told me how he now is breaking the law to protect himself and his family.

“In New York,” he said, “the gun laws are so strict, the majority of people who have them are the criminals. Maybe if you’re a small-business owner or have some other valid reason for protecting yourself, you might get a permit to carry. But if you’re a regular guy like me, forget about it.

“But I live on the Brooklyn-Queens border, and in that part of town there’s only one way to protect yourself — you got to let the punks know you’re packing heat.

“So I bought myself a street gun that I carry with me everywhere. Lots of the decent people in my neighborhood are carrying illegal guns. It’s the only thing we can do.”

The fellow knew what he was talking about.

A Cato Institute study found that 60 percent of criminals would not attack if they knew a potential victim were carrying a gun.

That’s the end result of people who for whatever reason, religious based or otherwise, force common folk into a position of impotence when it comes to self defense.  People deal with the moral obscenity by ignoring the law, turning innocent people who want means of self defense into criminals.

This is what they do in New York, it’s what they do in Chicago, it’s what Ms. Cabrera advocates, it’s what some ignorant religious folk do, and it’s what the collectivists want.  And it’s morally obscene and they will be judged for it.

Fox News:

A pair of Democratic lawmakers are proposing steep new taxes on handguns and ammunition, and tying the revenues to programs aimed at preventing gun violence.

Called the “Gun Violence Prevention and Safe Communities Act,” the bill sponsored by William Pascrell, D-N.J., and Danny Davis, D-Ill., would nearly double the current 11 percent tax on handguns, while raising the levy on bullets and cartridges from 11 percent to 50 percent.

“This bill represents a major investment in the protection of our children and our communities, and reflects the long-term societal costs of gun and ammunition purchases in our country,” Pascrell said.

The lawmakers say the bill would generate $600 million per year, which would be used to fund law-enforcement and gun violence prevention.

Critics predicted defeat for the measure.

“What the anti-gun interests can’t ban, they want to tax it out of existence,” Alan Gottlieb, chairman for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, told FoxNews.com. “It’s nothing more than confiscatory taxation.

“I doubt this bill will pass, but we will lobby against it if need be,” he added. “This is simply another shot against gun owners in this country.”

The bill would exempt all federal, state and local agencies, including police departments, from paying the tax.

The bill would also increase the transfer tax on all weapons (except antique guns) covered under the National Firearms Act (which excludes most common guns) from $200 to $500 and index to inflation and  increase the transfer tax for any other weapon from $5 to $100.

I don’t care much about the increase in fee for the tax stamp, since I will never, ever register a firearm with the ATF or pay a tax stamp.  But the philosophy is that if we cannot beat them at an outright ban, then we can tax them to the point that they cannot afford to own weapons or ammunition.

This approach is both irrational and unconstitutional, not to mention immoral.  But something must source the massive expansion of the federal Leviathan, and the Congress has figured out that we will not give up our guns or our shooting.  Feed the beast, even if it makes use of what they loath so much – our freedoms.  It sure must seem a Faustian bargain to them.

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.