Around the world, the N.R.A. is finding that a rights-based approach translates into many languages. As the N.R.A.’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, says: “They made the rights argument [in Brazil.] They made the argument that this was being taken away from the people.” He pauses. "It caught Iansa" — the International Action Network on Small Arms — "by surprise. They already had the Champagne on ice." In the mid-1990’s, the N.R.A. became a nongovernmental observer at the United Nations and helped form a global coalition of pro-gun groups to match disarmament coalitions. At U.N. conferences, this coalition then uses success in national referendums to argue against global treaties. "The vote in Brazil on last Oct. 23 was a mandate," the head of one gun-advocacy group argued at the U.N. conference this July. "The international anti-gun community, especially powerful NGO’s, was intimately and extensively involved in supporting the gun-ban referendum. They lost. They did not receive the mandate."..

Going global also can provide a defense against the influence of international law, which judges like Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer have increasingly introduced into American courts. Conservative legal organizations like the Alliance Defense Fund have headed to countries like Sweden to combat international precedent on issues ranging from human cloning to home schooling. And conservatives now realize that by co-opting the language of rights, traditionally employed by the political left, they can export their own ideas of universal rights, whether that means the White House’s democratization program or a universal right to bear arms.