I can accept many of the things you say.
But not in reference to the bill of rights being better if the meaning changes from day to day.
Also gun rights in the US are not without limit. Anything resembling an M203 is illegal for private ownership, if functional.

Quote Originally Posted by Bren122 View Post
I am not a leftie, Duncan.
"Freedom must be defined in order that it may be grasped."
A constitution or treaty is only as effective as the spirit that motivates it; the British in WW1 felt strongly about the preservation of the Belgian political entity from its long association with Flanders in general. Germany had no such feelings and thus, despite being a co-signatory of the Brussels Treaty, had no compunction about violating it.
If America did not have an underlying belief in the concepts of equality, liberty and fraternity then the documents themselves would mean nothing. we know this for the US constitution, as important a legal and political milestone as it is, has only worked once. the constitution and the Bill of Rights are meant to be a formalisation of underlying principles; as perspective on those principles has changed, so the documents have been changed, whether by judicial judgement or the ammendments process.
courts, police, parliaments, etc only work when they are allowed to work; if you did not agree with a judgement in a legal case you can easily go into a court room and redress that judgement with a gun. but if everyone does that why have a court system in the first place? similarly the first move in a dictatorship is to ensure the political compliance of the judiciary as an entity. the American system can be biased by political appointments but not to the point of removing opposing judges in order to replace them with your appointees.
The British and Australian (and NZ and Canadian) systems are built on common law and parliament, etc but, really, they are defined by the collective understanding that the alternative is chaos. you don't need a Bill of Rights unless you are trying to impose a certain point of view as being the sole basis of argument; the beauty of the Westminster System is that it can move back and forth between the two opposites and find a middle ground that might not make everyone happy but is a workable solution to diametrically opposed views. if you look at the gun debate in America, which is severely limited by the 2nd Amendment, it promotes extremist positions that ultimately fail to address some of the legitimate concerns that an unlimited gun control policy has allowed to foster. (why does the average citizen NEED a grenade launcher?)