MANCHESTER, Conn.

DID CONNECTICUT U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, knowingly accept preferential treatment from a mortgage company, obtaining discounts on two residential mortgages?

That’s the widely publicized accusation. Dodd denies it, and the evidence is less than overwhelming. The terms of Dodd’s mortgages seem within the range offered by other lenders at the time, and Dodd says he dealt only with ordinary loan officers at the mortgage firm, Countrywide Financial Corp., which, as it neared collapse recently, was acquired by Bank of America.

While reports say that Dodd’s mortgages were issued under a program for “very important people” who were “Friends of Angelo” — Countrywide chief executive Angelo Mozilo — Dodd says he has never met Mozilo and thought that any advantages in his mortgages arose from his being a longtime Countrywide customer.

Maybe Dodd should have been more curious, but there is room for doubt and Dodd may be given its benefit, insofar as he seems not ever to have taken personal advantage of his office before. Indeed, 20 years ago, long before the practice was forbidden by Senate ethics rules, Dodd was the first senator to stop taking speaking fees from special interests, fees that long had been considered a normal part of every senator’s income. Dodd always has seemed extra careful about such things, perhaps having learned from the Senate’s censure of his father, Thomas Dodd, who was also a senator, for financial impropriety in 1967.

But giving Dodd the benefit of the doubt about his mortgages would not make him any less the tool of Wall Street. Indeed, whatever advantages those mortgages gave Dodd are insignificant compared with the financing of his political campaigns by financial interests whose irresponsibility and rapaciousness have helped push the national economy to the brink of collapse.

That irresponsibility and rapaciousness were unleashed in large part by the diminishment of government oversight and regulation — diminishment pushed hard by Dodd himself, who nine years ago helped to arrange repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial banking from investment banking and had limited the sort of financial speculation about which many in Congress have begun to complain. Now Dodd is seeking legislation that, at taxpayer expense, would bail out irresponsible mortgage lenders in the name of rescuing irresponsible borrowers.

The dubious accusation about his mortgages has made Dodd uncomfortable, but if it detracts from the far bigger issue, his subservience to Wall Street, it could actually help him politically.

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So the Second Amendment to the Constitution does establish an individual right to bear arms, including handgun ownership, after all. While the U.S. Supreme Court was sharply divided as it reached that conclusion last week, one may wonder why the Founders bothered to put the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights if it was not meant to be an individual right and a restraint against government, not meant to be another guarantee of limited government. If, as some contend, the right to bear arms was meant to be completely conditional upon membership in a militia, and not an individual right, there would have been no need to put it into the Bill of Rights, the Constitution already having given Congress the power to “provide for the common defense.”

Constitutional interpretation aside, the court’s decision clears the way for moderate and practical policies on guns. It nullifies the District of Columbia’s extreme ordinance, which outlawed possession of handguns and allowed long guns in private homes only if they were unloaded, disassembled, or equipped with trigger locks — that is, only if they were virtually useless for self-defense.

But the decision allows states and municipalities to continue to require licenses for guns and to impose restrictions short of prohibition. As the House chairman of the Judiciary Committee of Connecticut’s General Assembly, Michael P. Lawlor, quickly noted, the decision will not impair the state’s gun laws, which are already strict.

The Supreme Court’s decision will be lamented as a blow to fighting crime, but, as the District of Columbia itself has proved, the jurisdictions with the most restrictive gun laws are also the most crime-ridden. Because criminals disregard them, gun restrictions do little more than disarm the law-abiding who would protect themselves, particularly where the police are least adept. Besides, what is perceived as the country’s gun-crime problem is mostly just a matter of drug prohibition, as its gun-crime problem in the 1920s was mostly just a matter of alcohol prohibition.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.