For its 2010 product line, Weatherby, Inc. decided to go after a growing segment of its market with a new offering: the PA-459 pump-action shotgun. The numbers in the model name weren’t chosen at random, or because they trip nicely over the tongue. “Our new pump shotgun is named after Penal Code 459, which covers ‘burglary in progress,’” Brad Ruddell, Weatherby’s vice president of sales and marketing, said in a press release at the time. “For this reason, we’ve been careful to do our homework in designing this firearm with features that deliver top-flight performance in threat response situations.”

The next year, Weatherby introduced three additional shotguns, including two variants to the PA-459, as part of its relatively new “threat response” line. “[T]hese new shotguns are designed for easy operation, fast handling and dependability in threatening situations,” Ruddell said in that year’s release. “They offer affordable and formidable protection for two of the most priceless basics of life: home and family.” Weatherby’s Threat Response line now includes four products: two rifles, and two shotguns, both with the 459 model number.

None of this might be worth mention outside of gun shows or publications aimed at enthusiasts, except that Weatherby is known for making weapons for hunting, not home defense or “threat response.” Indeed, it spawned a non-profit, the Weatherby Foundation International, which describes its mission as “educat[ing] the non-hunting public on the beneficial role of ethical sport hunting and its contribution to wildlife conservation.” And it was at the Weatherby Foundation International’s 2013 Hunting and Conservation Award Dinner, held on Tuesday night, that the National Rifle Association executive director Wayne LaPierre first responded to President Obama’s inaugural address, and offered a preview of the N.R.A.’s stance toward the new assault-weapons-ban legislation that Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat of California, would announce on Thursday.

LaPierre’s speech was, as anyone who saw the press conference he gave shortly after the Newtown shootings might expect, combative. It was a proud case for absolutism, and it was built on a foundation of untruth and paranoia. He took a line from Obama’s address—“We cannot mistake absolutism for principle”—that, in context, was clearly not aimed at any one group in particular, and turned it into an attack on gun owners and supporters of gun rights. He twisted Obama’s proposal to strengthen and make universal the system for background checks of prospective gun purchasers into a “federal list of gun owners,” and declared that there could be “only two reasons” for such a list: “to tax them or take them.” And, toward the end of his speech, he built on a message that his group débuted in their (inaccurate) ad focussing on Obama’s children and the protection they receive:

We believe we deserve, and have every right to, the same level of freedom that our government leaders keep for themselves, and the same capabilities and same technologies that criminals use to prey upon us and our families. That means we believe in our right to defend ourselves and our families with semi-automatic technology. We believe that if neither the criminal nor the political class is limited by magazine capacity, we shouldn’t be limited in our capacity either.

Some of this, clearly, is a political and public-relations strategy. (And it might not be a bad one: the New York Times, for example, reported some plainly false assertions that LaPierre made without bothering to rebut them.) But it’s also a reflection of the essentially dystopian view of the United States promoted by the N.R.A. and its allies, by LaPierre, and by the firearms industry generally. They imagine a nation in which the government could turn dictatorial at any moment, in which rampaging criminal mobs are always waiting in the shadows for their opportunity to, as LaPierre said, “prey upon us and our families.”

In his post-Newtown press conference, LaPierre warned that “our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters,” in addition to a “much larger, more lethal criminal class—killers, robbers, rapists, gang members who have spread like cancer in every community across our nation.” And, of course, he offered what he said was the “only” solution: “a good guy with a gun.”

This attitude has played a large role in the surge in popularity of military-style weapons marketed specifically for home defense, and brought companies like Weatherby into that niche. And it has persisted even as the crime rate in the U.S. has plummeted.

In 2011, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is compiled by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 3,613,190 household burglaries in the U.S. (For some reason the burglary rate jumped between 2010 and 2011, despite a general downward trend in burglaries and in the overall rate of violent crime, which is down seventy-two per cent since 1993.) There were, the government says, 123,038,570 households in the U.S. in 2011; that means that about three per cent of households were victims of a burglary that year. Even that number wildly overstates the amount of burglaries worth responding to with an assault weapon. According to the N.C.V.S., in the years from 2003 to 2007, an average of just twenty-eight per cent of burglaries happened when someone was home, and only 7.2 per cent of burglaries turned violent. Moreover, the N.C.V.S. data shows, the burglar or burglars were carrying weapons thirty per cent of the time; that weapon was a firearm only twelve per cent of the time. There were roughly 116,011,000 households in the U.S. in 2007, and an estimated average of 266,560 burglaries in which someone in the home was attacked—in other words, there’s about a .23 per cent chance that the typical American household will be hit by a violent burglary in a given year. Since the burglary rate is usually considerably higher in urban areas than in suburban and rural areas, it’s a good bet that the rate of N.R.A member households hit was even lower than that.

And there’s scant evidence that guns really are used in self-defense as often as gun-rights supporters claim. The number they cite is 2.5 million uses annually, but that figure has been repeatedly debunked, as has the lowest estimate provided by proponents of gun control, which is about a hundred thousand uses annually. Though no one really agrees on this—in part because the gun lobby has done a good job of preventing research into such things, which Obama is trying to change—the most commonly accepted estimate is that guns are employed for self-defense roughly four hundred thousand times each year. If that’s the case (and that number may now be too high, as it’s old, and, again, the crime rate has fallen), then in all of 2011, a mere .325 per cent of U.S. households used a gun to respond to a threat. And there’s no telling how much that number is influenced by the fact that there are so many guns around—we simply don’t know how often it was actually necessary to resort to a firearm, or whether it just happened to be there in a situation that might easily have been defused in another way. It may simply be that there just weren’t that many bad guys with guns for the good guys with guns to stop.