The Senate was right to block a move to erase states' rights to set their own standards for 'concealed carry' handgun permits.

If the U.S. Senate had voted a hair to the right on Wednesday, gun-rights advocates would have come a big step closer to their goal of a pistol-packing America. Fortunately, most Senate Democrats and two Republicans defeated an amendment that would have allowed gun owners to carry concealed weapons more freely across state lines.

Unfortunately, Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan of Greensboro voted the other way, no doubt to the dismay of many North Carolina Democrats who supported her insurgent campaign last year to unseat Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole. The state's other U.S. senator, Republican Richard Burr of Winston-Salem, also supported the concealed-carry measure, but his vote was a given -- as were the votes of many other Republicans who wholeheartedly support states' rights, except when they don't.

Hagan offered no explanation in advance of her vote, nor did her Web site provide one yesterday. However, during her Senate campaign she declared her support for the Second Amendment and gun ownership, and she likely views her vote Wednesday in that light.

Instead, it was a vote on public policy -- a vote to override state and local jurisdictions' considered decisions on whether and how permits are issued to allow individuals to carry concealed handguns in public. It was a vote in opposition to the wishes of dozens of mayors and police chiefs nationwide, including the mayors of Raleigh, Durham and Greensboro. It was a vote for more handguns, not fewer handguns. And it was not a vote that was required by Hagan's deference to the Second Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in ruling 5-4 last year that a District of Columbia firearms ban (or near-ban) unconstitutionally infringed on what the court majority declared was an individual right to own guns, made it clear that states and localities could still impose reasonable firearms restrictions. And in court challenges since, such restrictions have stood up.

States are free to set their own rules about who is eligible to obtain a "concealed carry" permit for a handgun, and those rules vary. In Ohio and Mississippi, if you don't have a criminal record or a history of hospitalization for mental illness, you're in luck. Florida and Texas even issue permits to nonresidents on easy terms. New York is much, much tougher on handguns.

The amendment voted on Wednesday amounted to a far-reaching follow-on to a measure Congress approved earlier this year that allowed licensed gun owners to carry loaded guns in national parks. Holders of a concealed-carry permit in any state would have been able to "carry" in each of the 48 states that, to greater or lesser degrees, allow the practice. The right of states to make their own decisions about safe and sane licensing policies for their particular situation -- New York's does not equal Montana's -- would be shot down. In effect, the amendment would have established a permissive national concealed-carry standard, set at the level of the least restrictive state.

To those who envision a fully locked and loaded America, and apparently to Kay Hagan and Richard Burr, Wednesday's vote was a setback. In reality, it was a narrow, perhaps temporary, escape from an existence in which handguns carried in public are the rule, not the exception.