BY MANY measures, America’s pro-gun lobby is in bad shape. After a spate of shootings, notably last December’s murder of 20 children and six staff at a school in Newtown, Connecticut, its spokesmen sound shrilly out of step with majority opinion, and even with each other. Yet the gun lobby is poised for a big win.

Newtown left America winded by grief, with its tales of six- and seven-year-olds shot by a disturbed young man using his mother’s guns, among them a semi-automatic assault rifle. In January Barack Obama asked Congress for ambitious gun controls, including the renewal of a ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004 and universal background checks on gun buyers, closing a wide loophole that allows private sales without verifying the criminal or mental-health histories of buyers.

Much of that agenda looks doomed. Nobody expects assault weapons to be outlawed again. A ban on high-capacity magazines is possible, though of questionable use with so many already in circulation. A law on gun trafficking is thought likely to pass. Background checks may be extended to cover private sales, and improved by prodding states to feed more criminal and mental-health records into a federal database. But to recruit enough Republicans to guarantee Senate passage, a move to keep records of private sales may be ditched. Even before the Republican-held House of Representatives weighs in, gun-control advocates face a choice between small victories or utter failure.

The explanation is not the unifying leadership of the gun lobby’s loudest mouthpiece, the National Rifle Association (NRA). Much of the gun industry favours universal background checks, which the NRA opposes. Even some pro-gun Republicans express private disdain for the give-not-an-inch tactics of the NRA, whose executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, says the correct response to Newtown is armed guards in every school, and doing more to track the “monsters” and “lunatics” whom he blames for the mass shootings. The NRA’s logic on mental illness is hard to follow. It says it wants background checks improved with better mental-health reporting, but opposes using the database more often, saying universal background checks are a ruse for creating the national register needed to confiscate arms.

The gun lobby still mounts shows of defiance. March 11th saw the NRA and other groups summon hundreds of gun-owners to Connecticut’s capital, Hartford, to lobby state legislators over gun curbs. Less than an hour’s drive from Newtown they waved signs reading “Stand and Fight” and “Feels Like Nazi Germany”. An effigy was brought of the Democratic governor, Dannel Malloy, as an 18th-century British redcoat. But the fervour seemed undercut by a defensive note. Unbidden, activists sought to explain away a modest turnout, saying thousands more would have packed a weekend rally. Several cited identical talking points while swatting away facts that did not appeal. When Australia outlawed many guns after a mass shooting in 1996, home invasions rose a “horrible” 30%, and the same would happen in America, shuddered a gun-owner, Bob Brzozowski. The same statistic was cited by others there; but it is false. Australian robbery and break-in rates have fallen since 1996 (Australian gun-murder rates fell sharply too, with no offsetting rise in other homicides). As for polls showing majority support for universal background checks, Chris Duffy, one of the event’s organisers, declared: “I’ve never seen an opinion poll that wasn’t biased.” America is “a republic, not a democracy”, argued a demonstrator, Scott Pardales, to murmurs of agreement: 99.9% of voters could oppose guns, but the constitution would still protect the right to bear arms.

Such wagon-circling is understandable. In Connecticut and a few other Democratic states, tough local gun controls have passed into law or will do soon, even as federal action is stalled. Though America is saturated with guns, many are stockpiled in a shrinking number of homes. Recent surveys found guns in “only” between a half and a third of households, with steep declines among the young and Democrats.

People kill people, but guns make it easy

In that divided America, when exceptional horrors such as mass shootings prompt a search for exceptional causes, a growing number may turn their gaze to guns. That is why the NRA and allies offer an alternative narrative about America as an exceptionally violent dystopia, whose streets are prowled by mad or bad “monsters” that hand-wringing liberals refuse to lock up—so that good citizens need semi-automatics for what Mr LaPierre calls the moment when “glass breaks in the middle of the night”. Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, talks of keeping an assault rifle against gangs that might roam unchecked after a natural disaster or cyber-attack. Fear is potent stuff: 48% of gun-owners told a new Pew Research Centre poll that protection is their main reason for owning a gun, up from 26% in 1999.

Mr Graham may face a primary challenge from the right in 2014. He would not be the first politician, whether Republican or centrist Democrat, to use gun rights to earn conservative credentials. The self-interest of politicians represents the gun lobby’s true source of power. Interests can change, however. A political fund started by Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, recently spent millions attacking a pro-gun Democrat in a congressional primary, who duly lost. Republicans in suburban districts may regret representing “the party of assault weapons”, says Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut. There will be more mass shootings, predicts Governor Malloy, and politicians will answer to voters. In a country where gun rights run deep, that is the right way to fight for common-sense controls that might save lives. An embattled gun lobby is poised for a depressing victory. But democratic accountability may win out in the end.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington