You sound like you think these things happen by accident or circumstance.
We live in a 2 party system now and frankly, one party is doing it's very best to eliminate all other dissenting opinions. Personally, I'm glad there's a right to freedom of speech and press that limits their ability to do so...no matter how much they hate it.
Not accident, but a whole lot of very specific historical circumstance.
Personally, I'm also glad Australia has freedom of speech and a free press, and when the Federal Police raided an ABC journalist's office a while back it generated all kinds of concern across Australia and the courts and it was eventually found to be illegal.
Illegal, even though it didn't breach any bill of rights.
How did that happen?
My concern is that Australia, right now, is walking the fine balance between individual rights and community rights, between safety and freedom, between privacy and surveillance, between individual responsibility and a nanny state. I kind of like the balance in some areas, not so much in others.
HEALTHCARE a good your bill of rights forgot
EG: I like having a 'nanny state' pay all essential medical bills. To me this is a fundamental human right that America's Bill of Rights somehow overlooked. If you're an Australian citizen, you're insured! We have a public health system that should do all essential life saving health procedures on citizens. My son had cancer years ago, and we practically lived in the public hospital for months - for free. (Apart from fast food I bought myself now and then and incidentals like parking.) But the expensive chemotherapy treatments and scans and diagnostics and hospital beds? FREE! And this is without us being a communist state - last time I looked a few years ago, we only paid 1% more tax per unit GDP than Americans did. (However I'm guessing we pay less per capita military - you guys love being the world's main super-power, Brenton Woods and all that.)
To me government subsidised healthcare for the poor is a fundamental human right. It somehow omitted that. It was a blind spot of the era the paper was drawn up in, and so encoded the things it did want to talk about for all time, while leaving those other things out.
How did America end up with a Bill of Rights but no universal healthcare? It's such an obvious public good to me? I've heard stories of single mothers on welfare losing their sight because they don't have health insurance in American healthcare. Now, she's not that productive to society. She's a single mum, with young children, on welfare. But now she's also a burden to her family and community more because she can't afford a $15,000 operation? She can't raise her children as effectively, so in her family, the next generation of American citizens suffer. I don't understand.
GUNS a bad that your bill of rights enshrined
How did you end up with a Bill of Rights that gives Boogaloo's the right to wear Hawaiian shirts and sub-machine guns to a protest?
The
Port Arthur massacre of 28–29 April 1996 was a mass shooting in which 35 people were killed and 23 wounded in
Port Arthur, Tasmania...
...
Australians reacted to the event with widespread shock and horror, and the political effects were significant and long-lasting... ... Under federal government co-ordination, all
states and territories of Australia restricted the legal ownership and use of self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns, and tightened controls on their legal use by recreational shooters. The government initiated a mandatory "buy-back" scheme with the owners paid according to a table of valuations.
Some 643,000 firearms were handed in at a cost of $350 million which was funded by a temporary increase in the
Medicare levy which raised $500 million.
[39] Media, activists, politicians and some family members of victims, notably
Walter Mikac (who lost his wife and two children), spoke out in favour of the changes.
Port Arthur massacre (Australia) - Wikipedia
Australia has 0.01 gun deaths per 100,000 people, and
America has 15 times more at 0.15.
So your nation had a war of independence and a local militia united to throw out the British. So you thought guns in the community were a good idea. But how does a well organised local militia translate into a Boogaloo teenager standing out on the street with a military grade rifle in a time of peace? I'll tell you - it's encoded into your fabric as a nation by the "Right to bear arms". But should that even BE THERE?
The
right to keep and bear arms (often referred to as the
right to bear arms) is a right for people to possess
weapons (arms) for their own defense.
[1] Only a few countries support the idea that their people have a right to keep and bear arms and protect it on a statutory level, and even fewer protect such a right on a constitutional level.
Right to keep and bear arms - Wikipedia
So when you say
"You sound like you think these things happen by accident or circumstance", I guess I agree! You threw out the British and in the heat of the moment, in a culture influenced by this historical peculiarity of how the USA was born, and crafted a Bill of Rights
in the biases of that culture. It has forever moved gun policy from parliament into the hands of a conservative Supreme Court - unwilling to make waves and maybe even unable to! It has forever moved gun law out of the democratic process and back a few layers where the people can barely ever touch it. And your nation is left with some of the higher deaths per capita from firearms in the world. You're rated 20th, in a time of peace!
Since 1990, the number of gun deaths has declined, the report said. But nearly every year since then, firearm deaths outside conflict zones
outnumbered deaths that occurred as a result of war.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about conflict, and probably, we should be spending as much or more time thinking about how to reduce firearm-related homicide and suicide,” Murray said.
There’s a new global ranking of gun deaths. Here’s where the U.S. stands
Summary: when a Bill of Rights can ignore universal healthcare for its citizens and enshrine nasty ideas like everyone having a "right to bear arms" (I mean, why oh why?) - we have 2 key examples where the ideas and values of one era in history can be enshrined forever in a way that very soon becomes outdated and dangerous and binding on a population.
You like a Bill of Rights? I prefer those areas be subject to democratic processes instead, thanks.
