The National Rifle Association, as I pointed out in my previous post, is on the offensive. Not content with its recent victory in Congress, it is already looking forward to the 2014 midterm elections, when it hopes to sink the prospect of effective gun control for another decade or more. So what, if anything, can be done? How can supporters of sensible measures to prevent the proliferation of deadly firearms—a group that includes the majority of Americans—hope to defeat the gun lobby?

In seeking answers to this question, I’ve been conversing with some folks in the gun-control movement, and the conversations were more encouraging than I had expected. Having spent a few weeks getting over their setback in the Senate, the N.R.A.’s opponents are taking President Obama at his word that it was merely the “first round” in a lengthy fight. Realistically, they can’t hope to knock out Wayne LaPierre and his four-million-plus members (the precise number of N.R.A. members is hotly disputed) anytime soon, but they are looking to defeat them on points. And they see signs of encouragement. Indeed, some of them believe that the N.R.A.’s historic victory could end up being viewed as a historic blunder.

“I think the gun lobby will come to regret that it didn’t do what Wayne LaPierre advocated in 1999, and accept more background checks,” Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, told me. “This vote really exposed to a lot of people just how outrageous the situation is. I think history will show that this was the moment when the American people decided they’d had enough.”

Gross’s argument assumes that popular opinion can change political outcomes, which is precisely what didn’t happen in the Senate. For he and anyone else who would like to tame the N.R.A., the question is how to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again. From the perspective of the armchair pundit, it’s easy to offer an answer: build an “anti-N.R.A.”—a populist and fearsomely effective national lobbying group that frightens the bejesus out of senators and congressmen who are thinking of toeing the line of the gun lobby. In a fragmented political system that is beholden to powerful interest groups, the influence of single-issue organizations, such as the N.R.A., Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, and even Planned Parenthood, has been demonstrated over and over again. Why can’t an “Americans for Gun Control” be added to the list?

There are many answers to that question, one of which is historical. The most successful single-issue organizations have deep roots. The N.R.A. dates back to 1871, and well before it became a Washington enforcer it was a popular membership society for hunters and target shooters. The origins of Planned Parenthood, which now has about four million members, can be traced back to 1921, when Margaret Sanger, one of the heroes of the feminist movement, set up the American Birth Control League. Americans for Tax Reform is a more recent creation, but it does go back almost thirty years—the Reagan Administration created it to lobby for its 1986 tax reform, and since then it has been sustained by donations from corporations and rich individuals that favor lower taxes.

History has left the gun-control movement with a more fractured nature. The biggest group is the Brady Campaign, which emerged from a group called Handgun Control Inc., which was founded in the nineteen-seventies. In 2000, it was renamed in honor of James Brady, the former press secretary in the Reagan Administration who was partially paralyzed after being shot in a 1981 assassination attempt on the President. According to Gross, the Brady Campaign now has about a million members and supporters. Then there is the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which brings together almost fifty medical, religious, and community groups. There is also Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an increasingly aggressive and influential organization that Michael Bloomberg set up in 2006, and a number of smaller groups, such as the National Gun Victims Action Council and Stop Handgun Violence. After the Newtown massacre, a new organization appeared on the scene, Moms Demand Action, which shouldn’t be confused with Million Mom March. (That’s part of the Brady Campaign.)

If this list of organizations sounds a bit confusing, it can’t be helped, gun-control advocates say, and it doesn’t preclude effective action. “It’s not about creating a single, monolithic organization” like the N.R.A., Gross insisted. “It’s about expressing the voice of the American public—from moms to mayors to people who live in impacted communities.” Arkadi Gerney, a former head of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, agreed. “There is no ‘silver bullet’ organization on our side of the debate,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “It’s going to take a bunch of actors and a lot of voices—mayors and moms, cops and faith leaders, victims and responsible gun owners—to engage. This will be less unified, less command-and-control. But it is coming together—and when it does it will represent a much broader swath of the American public than the NRA’s lobbyists could ever hope to engage.”

On first hearing this argument, I confess, I didn’t buy it. If you were a Democratic senator representing a Western state, whom would you fear more? The N.R.A. or an unwieldy coalition of gun-control groups? But Gross and Gerney both insisted that the splintered nature of the anti-N.R.A. movement offered some advantages. The various groups can work together to take advantage of their over-all scale, while also engaging different sections of the public and dividing the labor of political campaigning. For example, the Brady Campaign, with its wealth of volunteers, can focus on calling politicians and other labor-intensive tasks, whereas Mayors Against Illegal Guns, using Bloomberg’s money, can run targeted ads in key districts. “There is a heightened sense of everybody needing to fill certain roles—more so than in the past,” Gross said. “I think there is a fundamental respect for the value that other groups bring to the table. It’s great for us that we don’t have to spend ten million dollars in advertising because somebody else is doing it.”

At the state and local level, which is where many gun-control initiatives are being rolled out, there is also a lot of coöperation between the various groups. “Our fragmented approach has its advantages,” Leah Gunn Barrett, the executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, said in an e-mail. “Moms Demand Action is grassroots and sprang upnationally after Sandy Hook. Here in NY we have been able to help them with policy, data and making connections in the state and they have helped energize us with their newfound passion and energy. This is happening in other parts of the country. We are also connecting with doctors’ groups such as Doctors for America who care deeply about the public health costs of gun violence. Our groups represent the best in America. The NRA represents the gun industry and a few gun fanatics. They don’t speak for the country. ”

In a new report for the Center for American Progress, Gerney and one of his colleagues, Chelsea Parsons, point to Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Colorado as other states where grassroots campaigns involving lots of different organizations are enjoying success. Traditionally, the N.R.A.’s big advantage has been that is supporters bring a greater level of intensity to the fight, but today “(t)here is substantial evidence that the intensity gap has closed,” Gerney and Parsons write.