MANCHESTER, Conn.

WHEN GUNS ARE outlawed, as the saying goes, only outlaws will have guns — along with, of course, the government, which lately has tricked the country into unnecessary war, repealed habeas corpus and imposed warrantless surveillance as part of the new national security state even as it has opened the country’s borders wider to illegal aliens.

So it is strange that liberals, ordinarily the defenders of the liberties established by the Bill of Rights, are so hostile to the one in the Second Amendment — the liberty that, on account of a challenge to the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, seems about to get its first thorough interpretation by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Second Amendment, complete with a couple of commas that seem extraneous in modern grammar, declares: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

In support of gun controls like the D.C. ordinance, liberals stress the amendment’s dependent clause to argue that the right to bear arms is limited to those who are or may become part of a state militia. If a state wants to forego raising a militia this way, liberals argue, it can nullify the right.

Defenders of the right to bear arms counter that whatever the original premise for the right, the amendment still vests the people with it. Defenders of the right to bear arms also cite old statutes that recognize it as an individual right, apart from any militia.

As a matter of constitutional law rather than ordinary policy, liberals who are opposed to gun rights impugn themselves with their broad interpretations of other rights. Indeed, if liberals construed the Second Amendment as they construe the first, fourth, fifth, and 14th amendments, people would have not just the right to bear arms but the right to bear nuclear weapons as well.

Meanwhile conservatives don’t like to acknowledge that the people who wrote and ratified the Second Amendment could not have contemplated today’s arms — not only nuclear weapons but even the automatic rifles that have let criminals outgun the police.

But like it or not, the amendment says what it says. It does not distinguish among types of arms. To the contrary, it is absolutist and so can be claimed as protection even by terrorists making bombs. While the Supreme Court is not likely to construe it that way, in determining which controls are constitutional and which are not the court itself will be legislating, if not as restrictively as the District of Columbia. The court’s legislating in turn will signal Congress, states, and municipalities how far they can go to restrict gun rights. That will leave the country with the policy argument.

That argument should begin with an audit of gun control. Such an audit would find that jurisdictions with the toughest gun restrictions also have the worst gun crime, while those with the least restrictions have the least crime. The best example of this may be the District of Columbia itself, which, despite outlawing handguns, is fraught with gun crime and incompetent police work, though of course demographic factors are involved too.

Connecticut needn’t go all the way to the District of Columbia to question gun control. The state could note that its gun laws are the same in violent Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven as they are in peaceful Simsbury, Monroe and Bethany, which suggests that they make little difference. Besides, in light of the murders in July of an unarmed family in their home in Cheshire, murders that have been attributed to a couple of career criminals who still were given parole, state government would need a lot of nerve to tell people that they should not arm themselves. Indeed, the more that legislators examine Connecticut’s crime problem as a result of the Cheshire atrocity, the clearer it becomes that government won’t be doing much more to protect people. It’s too hard.

As much as the ideologues and constitutional scholars enjoy it, the Second Amendment issue is only academic anyway. For there are tens of millions of handguns and long guns in private possession in the country, they don’t wear out quickly, and no legislation is going to get many of them back. Only still more oppressive government could accomplish that. Indeed, the more that government tries to outlaw guns, the more that people might see the need to keep them.

Besides, the gun problem, like the problem of crime generally, is mostly just the problem of drug prohibition. And while drug prohibition can’t yet be discussed in conventional politics, any audit of that policy might find that it works no better than gun control.

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