"They are nowhere near as strong as the NRA," Alpers said, noting a "total lack of infrastructure" for a national New Zealand gun lobby. After all, Scalia argued in a 2008 decision on gun rights that, like most rights in the U.S., "the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited." Fears about a "total" weapons, ban, he said, would be "totally plausible" to many Second Amendment absolutists. "One of the barriers to getting tighter gun control in the U.S. is federalism and the states' rights tradition," he said. The result is that more conservative-leaning voters who tend to favour gun rights in rural districts also enjoy disproportionate influence in elections.

Source: CBC News March 22, 2019 07:52 UTC