The US’s constitution is not amended through an extra-legal process. It’s amended through a process quite clearly outlined in law by the body of the US government that’s tasked with writing legislation. In this respect, the modification of the US constitution is no different to any other modification of any other constitution.
Well, strictly speaking, people in the UK can own guns. They can obtain the right.
And US citizens are not born with the right to bear arms (children can’t own guns) and US citizens can have that right stripped from them (for example, felons).
The difference between the countries in their current gun ownership laws is a matter of degree.
But the fundamental difference is in what the respective governments might be able to do with regard to further tightening gun laws. In the UK it’s theoretically possible that all private ownership of guns becomes outlawed at some stage. In the US, that’s not possible under the current understanding of the law of the land.
N.B. I think all convicted felons in the US should be able to own any type of gun they damn well please. It’s their constitutional right as U.S. citizens.
That example is not a case in which the Court is saying the law contradicts the unwritten constitution. The court in that case says the actions of officials contradicted Parliament’s intent. Do you have another example of what you claim?
And the British don’t get to look at the US Constitution and say “Uh, well, big deal! We’ve had one of those all along!”
Because you haven’t. What you’ve had is a set of statutes. Not a fundamental law, unchangeable except by the governed, acting via a super majority.
When did the British first begin calling their collection of statutes and vague notions a “Constitution” anyway? I’ll wager it was at some point after the US Constitution was written, in an effort to claim “firsties!!!” (Looking… Aha! Looks like I am right. The first such usage by the British seems to have been in Dicey’s An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885). Is there any earlier reference to a British “Constitution”?)
(Also, somewhat off topic, Ridley, your act of looking for opportunities to denigrate the US is getting a little tiresome.)
In what universe is the US the world’s oldest constitution? Even if we ignore ancient constitutions and restrict ourselves to the modern idea there are still European constitutions that are older than the US’s. For example, the country I am in right now, Sweden, brought their first constitution into law in 1772.
The law lords ruled the implementation of control orders by the home office breached article 5 (right to liberty) of the European Convention on Human Rights, implemented in the UK as the Human Rights Act 1998, and as a result the specific implementation of control orders needed to be amended.
A law which constitutes how the government is set up. In other words, a constitution.
Given that Cromwell et al were remonstrating in Parliament on the unconstitutional acts of the King, and later Parliament itself was complaining about the unconstitutionality of Cromwell’s Major Generals, I think you’re having a laugh here.
Denigrate the US? You poor thing. It must be hard keeping up the exceptionalism when people call you on it.
There is an important distinction between finding that acts of discretion violate higher law, and finding that entire statutes are unconstitutional. AFAIK, the UK does not have the latter kind of judicial review, which is a very large part of what makes the US system different from the UK system.
Hey Spoke, why don’t you find a definition of “constitution” that requires a constitution to be a “higher law”, whatever the hell that means. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition, for instance:
Notice the lack of something? Yeah. It’s the lack of anything related to what you’re talking about.
That’s not true – it’s also theoreticaly possible that in the US all private ownership of guns becomes outlawed at some stage. It would, of course, require a constitutional amendment which is a well-defined legal process.
Please tell me what a “higher law” is. As far as I can work out, to amend the US Constitution requires:
Whioch was written in article 5 of the US contitution as:
Now seeing as many Constitutions require that any proposed amendments have to be voted upon by two or more consecutive governments (for example, Sweden: “To amend or to make a revision of a fundamental law, the Parliament needs to approve the changes twice in two successive terms, with a general election having been held in between.” Basic Laws of Sweden - Wikipedia) can people in these countries arbitrarily decide that the US Constitution isn’t sufficiently “higher law” enough and declare it not a constitution, because that is what you are doing.
Firstly, Sweden was just an example. The Netherlands is another country that has the same “two governments” rule:
I’m not sure why you are insisting that the Swedish Constitution dates from 1974. The very Wikipedia page linked to by someone else in this thread states that the 1810 Act of Succession is a part of the Swedish COnstitution. If we are deciding the age based on when the most recent part was added then the US Constitution dates back to 1971.
Secondly “cannot be changed at the whim of a majority” is very much open to interpretation. From the point of view of the Swedes and the Dutch, the US system of need a majority in a certain percentage of states with no requirement for a general election could very easily be seen as “the whim of a majority”.