One of the cynical arguments that Senate members recently invoked in ducking their responsibility to enact stronger gun controls was that the government first needed to enforce laws already on the books. The hollow, Catch-22 reality of this position has been underlined by a new inspector general’s report pointing out that a severely understaffed and under financed federal firearms agency failed to inspect nearly 60 percent of the nation’s 125,000 licensed gun dealers in the last five years.

The report did not point out that Congressional opponents, obeisant to the gun lobby’s demands, have imposed various hobbles on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to impede its performance. A 1986 law, for example, generally bans the bureau from making more than one unannounced inspection a year at a gun shop. Congress has made it more difficult to revoke the licenses of offending dealers, a process that can now take up to three years. Senate Republicans have repeatedly blocked White House efforts to name a new director of the bureau, and Congress has denied the agency the right to a central database to better track crime-scene weapons.

One result is that suspect gun dealers who fail to comply with such basic law as buyer background checks go undetected “for many years,” a time in which they continue to sell guns, the report noted. A particularly alarming problem is the inability to track 174,679 firearms reported missing or stolen from gun dealers’ inventories from 2004 through 2011, a lucrative channel into the black market that should be a red flag about unscrupulous dealers.

President Obama requested more federal funds to bolster the staff and efficiency of the firearms bureau. Public safety, however, has not counted for much in the face of gun lobby mendacity and Congressional timidity.