The Supreme Court's decision to hear District of Columbia v. Heller (formerly known as the Parker case), provides a welcome opportunity to air out a subject that has grown musty from malign neglect. The case asks whether the District's ban on owning handguns, and its requirement that long guns be disassembled or stored with trigger locks, violates the Second Amendment. Any reasonable reading must conclude yes. (For the record, the Second Amendment reads: "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.")

But reasonable interpretations of the Constitution are rare in certain circles, so in the coming months the public will be told that the second item in a Bill of Rights written explicitly to pro tect individual liberties does not apply to individuals. In the reading of gun-control advocates, the Founders wrote the First Amendment to protect individual rights -- then took a wide detour exempting individual rights in order to preserve only a collective right to state militias . . . then doubled back to the protection of individual rights for the rest of the amendments.

In this reading, "the people" means one thing in the First Amendment, something entirely different in the Second, and in the Fourth and Ninth Amendments reverts to the meaning used in the First. Even more oddly, in this reading the Founders used the term "the people" to refer to "the states" in the Second Amendment -- but took pains in the Tenth Amendment to draw an explicit distinction between the powers "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." (Why'd they do that? It's a complete mystery!)

GUN-CONTROL advocates get away with such shenanigans because they contend the Amendment's opening clause -- "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" -- somehow means only a state militia should be allowed to keep and bear arms, and then equate the militia with the modern-day National Guard. But historical evidence shows the militia was, and still is, nearly the whole of the adult populace. (Even D.C.'s own militia ordinance reads that way.) Now consider a parallel construction -- the statement, "A well-fed marching band being necessary to the amusement of a free state, the right of the people to grow and eat crops shall not be infringed." Gun-control advocates would say that sentence means only the marching band can grow food. But that is clearly not what it means.

Foes of gun rights insist the Second Amendment is outdated because the Founders could not have foreseen the type of weapons that would be available today. As The New York Times put it last week, "A lot has changed since the nation's founding, when people kept muskets to be ready for militia service . . . .The justices need to confront modern-day reality." This is not an argument one hears about, say, the First Amendment's applicability to modern printing presses or the Internet. Or about the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. In those cases, no one says rights have to shrink just because technology expands.

The Times and its liberal sympathizers are -- quite rightly -- unsympathetic to the argument from the Bush administration that a post-9/11 world requires expanded executive authority to suspend habeas corpus and detain individuals indefinitely, or to eavesdrop on Americans' phone conversations, or to torture terrorist suspects. In those instances the Bush administration says the need to protect Americans from wanton violence justifies infringing on American liberties. But liberals are quite adamant that saving lives is not a sufficient rationale for abandoning principles.

Yet when the subject turns to the right of American citizens to own guns, many liberals suddenly find that the goal of saving lives justifies just that.

FINALLY, liberals say the Constitution protects "fundamental" individual rights that it never even mentions, such as the right to abortion and the right to privacy -- but does not protect an individual right that it explicitly does mention, the right to bear arms. They can't have it both ways -- adopting the most expansive reading possible to support what they favor but the narrowest possible reading to reject what they oppose.

The Supreme Court should tell gun-control advocates: Sorry, friends -- the Bill of Rights is a package deal.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.