WASHINGTON – It took allegedly aloof Barack Obama to the brink of his last year in the Oval Office to take executive action to combat the national illness of gun violence.

He shed salty tears at the White House the other day in a rare display of personal commitment to one of the major domestic objectives of his presidency.

The modest proposals he introduced to a roomful of grieving parents from Columbine to Newtown and other loved ones of hundreds of innocent victims of the plague could have come earlier.

The president – many would say naively – had first tried after the shooting of 20 first-graders at the Sandy Hook School to move Congress to accept a more comprehensive agenda.

He put perhaps his most persuasive lieutenant, Vice President Joe Biden, in charge of the effort, but it only resulted in a massive and effective pushback from the National Rifle Association and the rest of the gun lobby.

This time around, Obama placed his oft-shielded feelings on the line, declaring that “the gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage right now, but they can’t hold America hostage.”

That seems a most optimistic observation, given the firm grip of conservative Republicans in Congress, many of them (along with conservative Democrats) in the pocket of the NRA. But at least as Obama enters his final presidential year, he has put himself squarely in the camp of urging a crusade that lives up to the liberal tradition of his party.

In his talk to the faithful, he reminded them of their past uphill struggles, especially the civil rights fight of the 1950s and 1960s. “Yes, it will be hard, and it won’t happen overnight,” he acknowledged. “It won’t happen during my presidency.” He noted that “the liberation of African-Americans didn’t happen overnight,” nor were women’s right to vote or gay rights advanced without “decades’ worth of work” by their adherents.

Among the initiatives Obama has offered are broader background checks of prospective gun buyers, particularly in sales on the Internet and at gun shows; hiring 230 more FBI personnel to conduct them, and encouraging new, built-in gun safety technology.

New laws would not be required, but Congress would have to authorize the spending for the new hires, an objective that predictably would inspire heavy gun-lobby opposition.

Although some polls indicate 90 percent of respondents, including gun owners, favor broader background checks, the spark for such a mobilization against the gun lobby is not yet evident, even after all the mass shootings ticked off in the president’s speech.

The great civil rights campaigns of the last half-century, and the anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s and 1970s, were ignited by much wider dissent in the nation’s streets.

The more recent outbreaks of public ire over police shootings of African-Americans have been more localized, as have been such protests as the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter campaigns.

Obama, despite his emotional bid to rally the broad public with his observation that the gun lobby “can’t hold American hostage,” has yet to provide such a spark.

While seeming to take the NRA head-on, Obama pointedly endorsed the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling that the Second Amendment conveys the right to bear arms.

Many liberals continue to argue that restraints can be legislated, and Obama himself observed that under the First Amendment “we understand there are some constraints on our freedom in order to protect innocent people.”

Predictably, the 2016 Republican presidential candidates have been quick to create a chorus of exaggerations against his latest, modest proposals to cope with the American gun sickness.

Ads for Ted Cruz broad-brushed them by declaring: “Obama wants your guns.” Jeb Bush told the Florida press that Obama’s intentions to “impose his gun control agenda by executive order show an utter disregard for the Second Amendment as well as the proper constitutional process.”

In all, however, the president deserves credit for taking another, if tardy, stab at the mass gun violence that continues to make America the subject of mockery abroad and dismay at home among a citizenry unable to face up to the deplorable self-policing that exacts such a high human price on itself.

Editor’s note: Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.