We learned on Tuesday that Barack Obama, in his final year of office, will continue to test the boundaries of executive authority in order to break through congressional inertia. Americans have already witnessed the president’s instant impact on issues like LGBT discrimination, climate change, and immigration. The result has been at times sweeping, like changing the status of millions of undocumented immigrants and pushing the power sector to cleaner sources.



Now Obama has taken action on gun violence. At the time of the Umpqua Community College shootings in Oregon last fall, Obama said he asked his team “to scrub what kind of authorities do we have to enforce the laws that we have in place more effectively to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.” What he got after that scrubbing was a set of new executive orders that the White House knows fit comfortably within the president’s legal boundaries, building on the 23 actions he signed after the Sandy Hook shooting.

Staying safely within his executive limits also means that the order he signed Tuesday will only modestly improve gun-law enforcement. Even many Second Amendment absolutists are untroubled by the new rules. Gun reformers, while pleased that the president did something, are left with a troubling question: Was this really all Obama could do? More important, where can his successor—if it’s a Democrat—go from here?

Obama’s order is certainly no radical departure from traditional executive authority. (Even Republicans have pursued executive action on guns, like President George H.W. Bush’s ban on foreign-made assault rifles). Obama makes a number of incremental changes, the most significant is a broadened definition of who is “engaged in the business” of selling guns from beyond traditional brick-and-mortar licensed dealers to individual sellers. This wouldn’t close the so-called gun show loophole allowing guns to pass among private sellers without a background check, but it effectively narrows the pool of unlicensed dealers that can. Obama’s other measures include requesting that Congress provide more funding for addressing mental illnesses, assigning more FBI agents to gun crime oversight, and removing privacy health rules that let the mentally ill pass a background check.

“He’s putting tools in place to reign in the most dangerous private sellers,” Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research Director Daniel Webster told me yesterday after Obama’s announcement. “He’s trying to move federal gun law enforcement into the 21st century.”