A "bill of rights" is a piece of paper. A piece of paper which is ruled upon by a court that was granted its power by the very same collection of papers.
For example, the right to keep and bear arms (obviously not for hunting but for war and security) has been infringed upon many times, but constitutional courts have decided that actually despite the bill of rights, some infringement is allowed. (EDIT: And this doesn't even address the problem of governments creating unconstitutional laws or executing unconstitutional actions which de facto strip your rights for some possibly significant time until it can be overturned by a court, but without much redress or punishment or deterrent)
In the end the people are the ultimate arbiters and deciders of what rights they are willing to give up and what powers they are willing to be governed under. This plays out the same way in USA and Australia and Afghanistan and Libya.
I've never understood why America puts of with basically being a police state, with the level of police brutality and incarceration that they have.
And here in aussieland, we don't have that, but we do nothing to protect our liberties.
Unfortunately this creates a strong incentive for all governments to actually create such societies and increase division and mistrust in order to gain power.
> Unfortunately this creates a strong incentive for all governments to actually create such societies and increase division and mistrust in order to gain power.
Have you actually been to Australia before? Or Europe for that matter? Or Japan? Your claims don’t make much sense with the current examples. All we have is a developed country that heavily values the right to bear arms and has a horrible crime rate, while the other countries are the exact opposite.
I didn't say they were.
> Have you actually been to Australia before? Or Europe for that matter? Or Japan?
Yes, yes, yes. Worthless rhetorical questions.
> Your claims don’t make much sense with the current examples.
What claims?
> All we have is a developed country that heavily values the right to bear arms and has a horrible crime rate, while the other countries are the exact opposite.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but Europe is not a country. And there are more countries than your examples with differences in crime rates and gun ownership, so I suspect whatever point you are trying to prove with selective data points wouldn't actually hold up.
Patently false from all available exemples.
And nowhere did I say that that is the only reason a society would be willing to turn to the state for protection, so spare me the false counter examples dressed up breathlessly to look like some incredible gotcha.
There is always going to be capacity for doing better, society is always what we make of it, even without hard legal limits (not to suggest imposing limits of state power is bad).