Those are all things that the Obama Administration — and the Hillary Clinton campaign — don’t want to talk about. So the editorial board of the Times has pulled out all the stops to ensure that we talk about gun control instead. Gun control isn’t a great issue for the Democrats, but it’s better than all those other topics of discussion, and the expected angry response from the gun-rights community will ensure that people aren’t talking about topics that make the White House look bad.

This approach — basically, trolling the public — is a variation on a tactic that Obama advisor David Plouffe calls ”stray voltage,” about which CBS’s John Dickerson commented, “The tactic represents one more step in the embrace of cynicism that has characterized President Obama’s journey in office.”

It’s cynical when Obama does it. It’s probably more cynical when the Times editorial board does it. And it’ll work, for a while, diverting several news cycles to talk of gun control, further inflaming and dividing the nation, but for all that, helping Obama and Hillary ignore issues they’d rather not talk about.