The White House intends to “engage” with gunmakers to “explore what more they can do” following Barack Obama’s tearful announcement of expanded background checks on gun buyers. With an eye on the manufacturers, the president called for new technologies to make weapons safer, such as trigger locks.

But recent history suggests his appeal will fail to persuade an industry that is more afraid of offending the gun lobby than confronting the White House.

In 2000, Smith & Wesson, one of the US’s oldest and largest gun manufacturers, broke ranks and agreed to work with the federal government to strengthen gun controls. It made a deal with the Clinton administration to install locking devices on handguns, develop “smart guns” capable of being fired only by their owners, and to design weapons blocked from accepting magazines holding more than 10 bullets. Smith & Wesson also agreed to sell only to responsible dealers and not at gun shows that do not require a background check for all sales.

In the wake of the Columbine school massacre the year before, the company saw the agreement as a good public relations move, sensing that there was growing support for greater gun control. It was also an attempt to head off a raft of lawsuits by cities that accused gun manufacturers of contributing to violent crime.

Instead, the decision drove Smith & Wesson to the edge of bankruptcy.

The backlash was led by the National Rifle Association, which accused the company of an “an act of craven self-interest” in becoming “the first gunmaker to run up the white flag of surrender”.

The NRA organised a boycott of the firm that almost halved its sales. Second amendment purists sold their Smith & Wesson guns. The company laid off workers.

Smith & Wesson eventually was sold and its top management was forced out. The new chief executive, James Debney, swiftly aligned himself with the NRA and is today a member of its elite Golden Ring of Freedom for donations to the organisation of well over $1m.

Two years ago, Debney made clear there was no danger of the company repeating its mistake when he told an NRA magazine that Smith & Wesson had not done enough to back the fight against gun control.

“We looked at the support we had given the NRA over time and decided, really quite honestly, that it wasn’t enough,” he said.

The breaking of Smith & Wesson sent a clear message to other manufacturers not to undermine the NRA’s unswerving opposition to any compromise on its interpretation of gun rights – a lesson that will loom large in the industry’s response to the latest Obama appeal for cooperation.

Barack Obama wipes tears during a press conference at White House calling for tighter gun regulations. Photograph: Bao Dandan/Xinhua Press/Corbis

It also challenges the widely held belief that the NRA is little more than a tool of gun manufacturers whose profits have surged in recent years, driven in part by fears of curbs on gun ownership after each mass killing.

“I think there’s a common misconception that the gun industry runs the NRA, but it’s the other way around,” said Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “The NRA runs the gun industry. I suspect it’s more like a hostage relationship. The boycott of Smith and Wesson ran that leadership out of business. That story repeats out again and again. Anyone who questions conventional wisdom from within the pro-gun movement, the NRA just destroys them. They very much run the gun industry.”

That’s a view shared by some of those inside the NRA, including Jeff Knox, a lifetime member of the organisation whose father, Neal, was a senior executive.

“The manufacturers don’t have nearly the influence that the media tries to make out. There are a few people in the industry who serve on the board and some have served on the board for a very long time. But the manufacturers need the NRA more than the NRA needs the manufacturers. The idea that the NRA is a shill for the gun industry, for the gun companies, is just silly. It doesn’t work that way,” he said.

Unravelling the ties can be complicated because they are so close.

The NRA’s annual revenue doubled in the decade to 2013, rising to $384m. Donations from gunmakers accounted for a good part of the increase.

In 2004, the NRA took in $46m in direct contributions separate from membership dues. A year later it launched the “Ring of Freedom” programme for what it calls “corporate partners” writing large cheques. Members get to wear custom-made gold jackets at NRA meetings. By 2013, donations had more than doubled to $96m.

The NRA also pulls in millions of dollars more from the industry through expensive advertising of weapons in the organisation’s magazines. That is topped by firms directing a proportion of sales to the NRA or buying their customers a membership.

The lines are blurred further by the presence of senior industry executives on the NRA board and in other positions. They include George Kollitides, former CEO of the Freedom Group, which owns the manufacturer of the semi-automatic rifle used to kill 20 children at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2013, and a trustee of the NRA Foundation, to which Freedom Group has made more than $1m in donations; Pete Brownell, CEO of Brownells, the world’s largest manufacturer of gun parts and tools who served as an NRA second vice-president; and Steve Hornady, CEO of a large ammunition maker in Nebraska.

“There is no more separation because they have gun industry executives sitting on their board of directors, like Pete Brownell and Steve Hornady,” Everitt said.

The steady flow of money and positions on the board might be expected to signal that the manufacturers wield considerable influence over the NRA, but the gun trade is not a typical business.

Other industries, such as tobacco and coal, have attempted to create what appear to be grassroots organisations as fronts for commercial interests; that role is reversed in the gun business.

The NRA claims to have four million members, but it is a core group of several hundred thousand who vote in the organisation’s elections and are most vocal in their refusal to compromise on gun rights that hold the greatest sway. That helps drive NRA policy.

The millions of dollars in donations that the NRA receives from gunmakers may be regarded less as buying influence than protection money intended to demonstrate their loyalty to the NRA and preserve their customer base.

“The NRA’s real power is not the money,” said Richard Feldman, who has worked on both sides as an NRA regional political director and then head of a gun industry body, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association (SGMA). “Its real power is that it’s perhaps the best run, true grassroots political organisation in the United States of America. There are NRA members in every congressional district, even if you go into parts of Brooklyn or parts of Baltimore. There are thousands of black NRA members in those districts. And go to a district like I’m in here in New Hampshire and there are 20,000 families that are NRA members in New Hampshire.”

Feldman felt the NRA’s lash as head of the SGMA after he helped negotiate the deal with the Clinton administration that Smith & Wesson signed up to. He even appeared alongside Clinton at an announcement at the White House to the fury.

NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre speaks during an annual meeting in 2014. Photograph: John Gress/Getty Images

Feldman said he was warned by NRA officials at the time that there would be a price to pay. Before long he was out of a job and the manufacturers had scrapped the SGMA.

Knox said gunmakers understood where the real power lay.

“Smith and Wesson were driven close to bankruptcy because of a policy that they took that NRA members and the grassroots were simply not OK with. That hurt them badly and reminded them that they had better be paying attention to what their friends at NRA tell them because while gun owners and gun voters will fight hard against our straight up enemies, they are much more vociferous when they feel like they’ve been stabbed in the back by someone who’s supposed to be their friend,” he said.

The partnership has served the gunmakers well, not least when the NRA’s lobbyists on Capitol Hill were instrumental in drafting and passing a 2005 law limiting liability claims against gun manufacturers who were facing lawsuits from several cities seeking compensation for health care and law enforcement costs resulting from gun violence. Mike Fifer, CEO of Sturm Ruger, one of the country’s leading handgun manufacturers, told the NRA that the law had probably saved the gun industry.

But Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, said the NRA retains the upper hand.

“The NRA and the industry are in bed together in a mutually beneficial relationship. Having said that, I think the industry fears what could happen if it gets out of line. There’s a history where when any member of the industry steps out of line and tries to be ‘the good gunmaker’, or an organisation tries to do that, the NRA has a long and storied history of squishing them like a bug,” he said.

On Wednesday Democrats in Congress joined administration officials in calling for a grassroots movement to counter the weight of the NRA.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said Americans should be buoyed by the president’s action to seek greater reforms from their elected officials. “After today, I hope voters will ask every candidate if they are willing to take reasonable steps to make our children safer,” Warren said in a conference call with reporters hosted by the White House.

“If the Republican party would rather work for the NRA than the American people … then somebody else has to step up,” Warren said.