Announcing last week his plan to regulate more gun sales by executive order, President Obama said the “gun lobby” is holding Congress hostage. Members of Congress from Connecticut and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy echoed that assertion.

Yes, Congress has been refusing to pass legislation most people find reasonable: requiring background checks for all gun buyers, not just those who purchase from licensed dealers. But the president and his allies demagogically minimize what they are up against. It is far more than an ordinary lobby and its concerns involve far more than background checks.

The president and his allies point to the infamous National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers, whose lobbyists stalk Washington distributing huge campaign contributions. There are indeed such lobbyists and contributions, but they are not the great strength of the opposition to more gun control.

Rather the “gun lobby” consists of tens of millions of people who own guns, who consider gun rights vital, and who are politically active. Strange as it may seem in liberal Connecticut, in many states such people constitute a majority.

By contrast, while polls suggest that most people favor comprehensive background checks for gun buyers, polls also suggest that most people don’t feel as strongly about gun issues as gun owners do and so are not politically active on those issues.

Of course such situations prevail everywhere in politics — motivation carries more weight than mere numbers. For example, while most people in Connecticut think that the evaluations of public school teachers should be public, they don’t care that much about it and are not politically active about it, while the teacher unions react with horror to the prospect of such accountability and their members are politically active. So a situation grossly contrary to the public interest easily prevails.

As journalist James Reston observed, the first rule of politics is the indifference of the majority.

With an estimated 300 million guns in private hands, the United States has what is fairly called a gun culture and has had one since the country’s establishment by rebellion, which is why gun rights were put into the Constitution. The gun culture sees that the real objective of many advocates of gun control is gun prohibition. 

That’s why the gun control issue is not what the president and his allies suggest most of the time, a matter of ordinary political venality, of honesty and public interest vs. dissembling and corruption.

Rather, the issue is part of the culture wars and thus, as the president and his ally, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, admitted last week, it is mainly a matter of winning elections. Mistaken as Congress may be, it has frustrated the president on gun control because so many people throughout the country disagree with him and because so many others don’t care much.

Vilifying these people may be satisfying but it will change few minds. That requires patient persuasion.

In support of his gun-control plans the president cited the Newtown school massacre and shed some well-publicized tears for the dead there. But his plans have no relevance to the massacre, which was a freak event arising from a parent’s stupidity, not from any lack of background checks or access to mental health care.

At least the president also mentioned the catastrophic gun violence in Chicago, his hometown, where fatherless young men commit murders every day at the center of the social disintegration caused by decades of mistaken welfare policy. Addressing that mistaken policy would save many more lives than more gun control, but the welfare lobby, with its tens of millions of employees and dependents, is even more fearsome politically than the gun lob