On Tuesday, in an emotionally charged speech, President Obama announced a series of relatively modest executive orders to aid in preventing guns from getting into the wrong hands.

The proposal would expand background checks through a clarification of existing regulations, increase funding for mental health care, and promote the development of smart guns.

The speech itself accomplished more than the executive actions are likely to accomplish. Viewed in political terms, the president injected this issue more firmly into the national debate as only a president can. Because a sitting president, even an exiting one, is always in the next presidential race: Other candidates are either running, at least in part, against his legacy or to extend it.

But there is one point that I was aching to hear articulated that wasn’t covered in the president’s speech, and is rarely mentioned in discussions about gun regulations: How our response to gun regulations is not now, nor has ever been, wholly ideological but is also ethnocentric and class-based.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/opinion/gun-control-and-white-terror.html