Vox Sentences: Obama is not taking your guns. Here’s what he is doing.

Executive orders on guns; Sunni-Shia conflict; and the Oregon takeover: the news cycle has taken pity on the world, and gives us a day to catch up.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Obama cries! And, oh yeah, announces action on guns

White House livestream

• President Obama formally rolled out his much-anticipated set of executive actions on guns today, in an emotional speech (that's journalist code for "he cried and it was a big deal").

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Vox's German Lopez explains what the executive actions are.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Now, Vox Sentences will explain four things they are NOT:

• These actions do not close the "gun show loophole." As Jonathan Adler explains, the executive action intended to tighten up the gun-show market wasn't a regulation — it was a "guidance," which is mostly useful as a signal to federal agents about what to enforce.

  [Washington Post / Jonathan H. Adler]

• The actions are also not exactly groundbreaking — Eli Hager at The Marshall Project traces many of the actions Obama announced today back to his last attempts to change executive-branch gun policy back in 2013.

  [The Marshall Project / Eli Hager]

• But the executive actions also are not totally meaningless. Because Obama is also ordering the government to hire 50 percent more background-check staff, the new guidance could prevent some of the errors that have been made in the past in vetting background checks (errors which can lead to people getting guns who legally shouldn't).

  [NYT / Larry Buchanan, Josh Keller, Richard A. Oppel Jr., and Daniel Victor]

• And finally — despite what Ted Cruz is telling his supporters, with a graphic that depicts Obama in what looks like a Nazi helmet — President Obama is not trying to take away anyone's guns.

  [NY Daily News / Rich Schapiro]

How to think about the Saudi Arabia/Iran conflict

Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

• The regional conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia shows no signs of cooling down.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• So along the same lines, here are two things that ARE going on, and two things that are NOT.

• This is a conflict between the Middle East's dominant Sunni and Shia powers, with factions drawn along sectarian lines.

  [NYT ]

• But it is not some sort of "ancient sectarian" conflict driven by the split of the two sects of Islam in the seventh century. Vox's Max Fisher explains how the Sunni/Shia split in Middle Eastern politics is largely a twentieth-century creation.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• The spat is another reminder of just how fraught the US alliance with Saudi Arabia has gotten. By picking a fight with Iran, Saudi Arabia is showing that it cares more about its regional alliances than its alliance with the US.

  [Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington / Hussein Ibish]

• But the US isn't walking away from the Saudis, and that means not upsetting them. Press Secretary Josh Earnest weakly condemned the execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr (which ignited the current Saudi/Iranian tensions), but wasn't terribly forceful.

  [Telegraph (UK) / Louisa Loveluck and Richard Spencer]

• And Nimr's brother directly blames the US for failing to intercede to save his brother's life.

  [Yahoo News / Michael Isikoff]

• Hypothetically, conflict between OPEC's biggest members should drive up oil prices. But because there's so much oil in the global market right now, it is not.

  [Foreign Policy / Keith Johnson]

How will it end in Oregon?

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• And finally, here are two ways that the takeover of a federal building in Oregon will not end — and two ways it might.

• The feds are not going to go in with guns blazing. This situation is all too reminiscent of two standoffs in the early 1990s, where federal law enforcement agents ended up taking innocent lives — and (belatedly) got called out for it by the public.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Ammon Bundy, the leader of the group who's taken over the building, told an interviewer from socialist magazine Jacobin that he thought the quiet response now meant the feds were planning some massive attack later. He is almost certainly wrong.

  [Jacobin / Margaret Corvid]

• Nor is the federal government planning to cut off power to the building in an attempt to freeze out the occupiers. At least, the government denied rumors today that that's what they planned to do.

  [John Sepulvado via Twitter]

• But there's one option for quick resolution: tomorrow, the local sheriff's office — which has already said the Nevada-native protesters should go back where they came from — will host a community meeting about the takeover.

  [FlashAlert Bend]

• This could be big, since Bundy has said that if the local community doesn't want the protesters there, they'll clear out of their own accord.

  [OPB / John Sepulvado]

• Otherwise, we could be in for a long standoff with the feds. For an idea about how that might look, check out this 1996 article in the New Yorker, written after a successful 81-day standoff with a militia group called the Montana Freemen.

  [New Yorker / Lucinda Franks]

MISCELLANEOUS

Sorry, but policing women's ability to say "sorry" is bad. [Washington Post / Jessica Grose]

• A group of women lawyers filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court's latest abortion access case telling the stories of their own abortions.

  [National Law Journal / Tony Mauro]

• I (Dara) can't decide whether I prefer the "Who are you wearing?" interview with the finance chair of the RNC, or with Henry Kissinger.

  [NYT / John Ortved]

• Do you know how Moby begins every single morning? No? Well here is how Moby begins every single morning.

  [NYT / Crystal Meers]

• Welfare reform was supposed to lift poor people up by incentivizing them to get jobs. That's all well and good — but in the Deep South, there just aren't any jobs for them.

  [Washington Post / Chico Harlan]

VERBATIM

"Some folks are messy. There’s worse things you could be. A serial killer for example, or one of those people who make their visitors use coasters." [The Guardian / Emer O'Toole]

• "When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926."

  [Gizmodo / Matt Novak]

• "Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)"

  [Barack Obama in 1983, via New York Review of Books / Edward Mendelson]

• "Martin flagged down the waitress and ordered the $120 tea…When Martin finished his tea, I asked how he liked it. 'I’m not really a big tea drinker,' he replied."

  [Washington Post / Jacklyn Collier]

• "One of the least-examined myths surrounding rape investigations is that these cases come down to he said, she said: When the victim and the suspect give their versions of the event, one party is lying and one is telling the truth, and somehow the detectives have to examine the quality of each person’s testimony, discern their individual characters and decide which is which. But the most current thinking on sexual-assault investigations is that there is always corroborating evidence. Detectives just have to be willing to search for it."

  [NYT Mag / Kathy Dobie]

WATCH THIS

The Oregon standoff, explained in 3 minutes [YouTube / Joe Posner, Johnny Harris, Dara Lind, Jennifer Williams, Sarah Turbin]

Screenshot from YouTube video of Jon Ritzheimer, posted December 31, 2015.

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