IF YOU’RE WONDERING WHERE MY FOXNEWS COLUMN IS — and no doubt there are, uh, several people who are — it won’t appear until Monday. I got it to ’em on time, but there was some kind of production glitch and half of it disappeared, so I had to resend it.

Anyway, their loss is your gain, because this column by Jeffrey Snyder on concealed-weapons permits is running in its place, and it’s swell. Excerpt:

Eleven states, including California and New York, still have the older, discretionary licensing statutes. They permit the chief of police or a local judge to issue carry permits to persons of “good character” who have some “good reason” or “proper cause” to carry a gun. The language of these statutes is so vague that issuance of carry permits is completely discretionary, and generally these statutes are administered as near-total bans, especially in cities and suburbs.

In New York City, for example, the people who seem most often to have both “good moral character” and “proper cause” to carry (besides those whose work requires them to carry) are celebrities, such as Howard Stern, or persons who have wealth, political influence or connections. Meanwhile, cab drivers — who are murdered or shot more frequently than police officers and far more frequently than celebrities — fail time and again to have “proper cause.”

In this manner, discretionary licensing schemes reveal an ugly fact: the state that operates on the basis of such a law clearly believes that only certain of its citizens are important enough to warrant the right of self-protection; the rest can just take their chances.

Yes. There are rather dramatic racial disparities in who gets permits, too. Imagine that.