The whole point about Newtown changing the debate—a notion that Begich initially ascribed to—was that such an utterly horrifying event had the potential to trump the realities of the gun debate: that even though gun-control opponents were the most committed and agitated the loudest, support for stricter regulation would expand in the broader electorate, giving elected officials the confidence to act. And that has happened. Support for expanded background checks is approaching Soviet-like majorities in polls. And yet, senators like Begich get cold feet because they are getting a lot of calls from NRA members, which they knew was going to happen—because it always has! It’s not a mystery: The NRA tells its members to call. They call.

What’s behind this sort of rationalization? The more charitable explanation is that these elected officials are succumbing to something that many of us do, a tendency to lose sight of context and scale. That is, to overvalue things that we see directly in front of us, without taking into account that they are but a tiny proportion of a much larger whole. Coburn represents 3.8 million people and Begich (whose office did not respond to my request for comment) represents 730,000, but if you’ve got dozens of people calling up on one issue in a given day, it’s easy to make that sliver out to be more than it really is, because it’s actual people on the phone with real names and specific claims and arguments and threats. This bias—Nate Silver surely has a word for it—is undoubtedly exacerbated by the ever-greater disconnect between our super-wealthy politicians and their increasingly tuned-out constituents. What better way for a senator or congressman who senses this disconnect to correct for it than to place great weight on the contacts that he actually does have with constituents? This is the same dynamic that led congressmen to overvalue the voices of those who turned out for town hall meetings on the health care law in the summer of 2009. You may have 700,000 people living in your district, but it’s the ones who are shouting in your face that you tend to remember most. This is why it’s so important for gun-control groups, with their new deep-pocketed backing from Mike Bloomberg, to counter with campaigns of their own, even if it takes more effort to rustle up the activists.

The less charitable explanation, of course, is that elected officials who buckle in the face of well-organized special-interest campaigns simply have the backbone of an earthworm. But the problem with chalking up this behavior to sheer cowardly expedience is that it is not at all clear that politicians are taking such a huge risk in voting against the gun lobby. There are plenty of Democrats who have survived in red or purple states despite getting lousy ratings from the NRA, such as Florida’s Bill Nelson. (The calculation is obviously different for Republicans like Coburn who have more to fear from a primary challenge than a general election loss, than it is for Democrats like Begich, who ought to realize that most passionate gun-rights voters are unlikely to vote for him no matter what.) And as I myself have written on several occasions, there is a case to be made that the supposed big victories for the gun lobby—the 1994 Republican sweep, Al Gore’s “loss” in 2000, were in fact much less clearly linked to the gun issue than the NRA et al would have us believe.

That is, politicians who are backing away from serious gun-control reform now out of worry about the next election may be making a flawed calculation based on bad history. Then again, even if it was based on more solid speculation, that would not theoretically keep them from voting for substantive reform simply because it was, you know, the right thing to do.