Given the brutal beatdown inflicted upon your battered but unbowed Volgi by Ghettoputer and the Czar (file photo), the Œc. Vol. offers a brief rebuttal to the former’s post. I have no arguments with his second and fourth points.

As to the first, while states can and do have power to regulate the carrying of handguns, what they’re doing here is calling into validity of other states’ legally issued documents, because their exactly analogous documents have differing requirements. Will New York next consider California drivers’ licenses invalid because they do not require parallel parking and thus pose a grievous hazard on the streets of Manhattan? Will they “review the qualifications” of every out-of-state driver? After all, every year New York has close to three times the auto fatalities (≈1,200–1,500 annually) than it has gun murders (≈500 a year for the same period).

As to the third, well, sure the Commerce Clause was made into a Mighty Fist of Economic Justice by the New Dealers, but it’s been roped in in recent years. And, of course, abusus non tollit usum. It is in the Constitution. Safe interstate travel profoundly affects interstate commerce.

Wandering afield from ’Puter’s arguments, Confucius would note that, given that concealed-carry has resulted in no greater (and less according to some scholars) gun crime anywhere it’s been implemented, the idea that New Yorkers and Californians will be endangered by their armed fellow citizens from lower-crime jurisdictions is arguably the opposite of the truth.

One detects more than a little whiff of New Yorker snobbishness in the arguments of Morganthau, Schumer, et al.: “Those rube states give gun permits to anyone. We can’t let those armed yahoos in here. After all, our beautiful Sullivan Act is perfectly crafted to keep crime by swarthy immigrants down. The last century of gun crime here must therefore be the result of evil, out-of-state guns from those disgusting states with driveways.” Please.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.