Ian Poulter, an English professional golfer who now lives in Florida, is best known for his heroics in the Ryder Cup, the biennial match between teams representing Europe and the United States. On Wednesday, Poulter got attention for his contribution to America’s discussion of guns. On Twitter, he posted a picture of an assault rifle and a Kinder Surprise, a chocolate egg treat that is popular in many other countries but is banned in the United States because of concerns that young children could choke on the small plastic toys the eggs contain. In Poulter’s image, the chocolate egg was marked “illegal,” while the assault rifle was marked “NOT illegal.”

“America WAKE UP NOW,” Poulter wrote in the body of the tweet. “@POTUS @realDonaldTrump & Congress change this now before more innocent people die. America you have been brainwashed.”

Outside of the United States, Poulter’s conclusion is widely accepted. In Germany, where gun sales are tightly controlled, roughly one person in a hundred thousand dies each year from gunshot wounds, according to GunPolicy.org, a research organization based at the University of Sydney. In the United States, where there are more guns than people, the fatality figure is about 10.6 per hundred thousand. Given this enormous discrepancy, and the regular gun massacres that unite the country in shock and horror, it is tempting to agree with Poulter that the country has been brainwashed. What other explanation could there be for this country’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge and act upon the obvious link between guns and gun violence?

And, yet, to think that the U.S. has been brainwashed overlooks the fact that a majority of Americans favor some gun-control measures. In a Quinnipiac University poll that was taken in June, fifty-four per cent of respondents said that they supported stricter gun laws, while forty-four per cent said that they opposed them. Ninety-four per cent of respondents expressed support for universal background checks. Other surveys have found similar results. According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, “Solid majorities of both gun owners and non-owners favor limiting access to guns for people with mental illnesses and individuals who are on federal no-fly or terrorist watch lists.”

Yet, despite findings like these, the gun lobby has won a series of victories in Washington and state houses stretching back more than a decade, to 2004, when the Bush Administration allowed a ban on the sale of semiautomatic assault rifles to expire. Earlier this year, President Trump signed a bill that revoked an Obama-era regulation making it harder for people with a history of mental illness to purchase guns.

A huge factor working in the gun lobby’s favor is that America’s political system, particularly in the Senate, overweighs the preferences of people living in sparsely populated rural states. The two-Senate-seats-per-state rule, combined with the filibuster, means that the will of the majority can be blatantly denied. That was what happened in April of 2013, when, months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, fifty-four senators voted to expand background checks, but the bill—which was sponsored by Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, and Pat Toomey, the Republican from Pennsylvania—still failed to pass. The “United States is now a non-majoritarian democracy,” E. J. Dionne, Norman Ornstein, and Thomas Mann wrote in the Washington Post on Wednesday. “If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, that’s because it is.”

Recently, I argued that the U.S. government’s inability to pass modest gun-control measures that have majority support is a symptom of a failing political system. But the situation isn’t entirely hopeless. If it were, the National Rifle Association wouldn’t have done what it did on Thursday, when it called for stricter controls on bump stocks—the gun accessories that Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, used to convert his semiautomatic rifles to automatic ones capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute. In a statement, Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s chief executive, and Chris Cox, the head of the organization’s lobbying arm, said that they were “calling on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) to immediately review whether these devices comply with federal law. The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.”

After this statement was released, some people interpreted it as a major retreat on the N.R.A.’s part. In reality, the organization may have seen it as a relatively painless way to head off growing calls for new, more stringent gun-control legislation. A day earlier, Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator from California, proposed a bill banning the sale of bump stocks, and a number of Republicans on Capitol Hill expressed a willingness to consider it. For the first time since the Sandy Hook massacre, it seemed likely that Congress would seriously consider gun control. And, if this happened, other measures were sure to come up, such as expanded background checks, and possibly even a renewed ban on assault rifles of the sort Paddock used.

By calling for bump stocks to be dealt with by administrative fiat rather than congressional action, the N.R.A. was looking to convert a legislative threat into a regulatory issue. Since fully automatic weapons are already illegal, it wasn’t giving up any substantive ground, and it was trying to prevent an open political debate in areas where it knows it is vulnerable.

The N.R.A. is all too aware of the poll findings I cited above. It also knows that, according to most surveys, a majority of Americans favor a ban on assault rifles. These figures apply to the population as a whole, about two-thirds of which doesn’t own firearms. But, even among gun owners, there is also a lot more support for gun control than the N.R.A. would like to admit. According to the Pew Research Center study, fifty-four per cent of gun owners support creating a federal database to track gun sales, something the N.R.A. has vigorously opposed for decades. Forty-eight per cent of gun owners support banning assault rifles, and forty-four per cent of them support banning high-capacity magazines.