Urban violence is threatening the quality of all our lives. Right now, in 2008.

Yet last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue of gun control, the oral arguments were dominated by talk of militias and muskets and, in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy, "remote settlers defending themselves against hostile Indian tribes and outlaws, wolves and bears and grizzlies and things like that."

And, oh yes: The English Bill of Rights of 1689. And Blackstone. Don't forget William Blackstone, the English jurist, who would be 285 on his next birthday. W.W.B.D.? That's what's really important for the Supreme Court to discuss when 8,000 people are killed each year by handguns, and tens of thousands more are injured, metal detectors are essential school equipment and guns are a leading cause of death among children.

The case at hand was a 1976 Washington, D.C., law banning handguns in private homes and requiring other guns, rifles and shotguns to be unloaded and disassembled or locked with a trigger lock. This is a kind of restriction undreamt of by the city of Philadelphia, still trying to get the Pennsylvania Legislature to let it limit gun purchases to 12 a year.

In its entirety, the Second Amendment says, "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."

The years-old argument is whether the amendment protects a collective right to weapons as part of state militias (think National Guard) or an individual right to own a gun.

For 69 years, the Supreme Court refused to hear appeals of lower courts that took the position that the right was collective, not individual.

Until last week, when five activist conservative justices on the Roberts Court were pretty clear. They intend to declare a Constitutional right to own a gun when they rule on this case, District of Columbia v. Heller, in June. What isn't obvious is whether their ruling will strip power to regulate guns from cities and state legislatures and even from Congress.

It could happen. Even U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement said that the decision by the Court of Appeals could result in overturning the federal ban on machine guns as unconstitutional. No wonder America's mayors and prosecutors and police are alarmed. Such a development would leave them with even fewer legal weapons than their already meager arsenal.

Last week, the justices seemed confident they could read the minds of the Framers of the Constitution, or maybe they were just reading NRA talking points. At times the similarity was striking.

They kept coming back to that "remote settler" - Justice Kennedy brought him up four different times. Think of him in his tri-cornered hat, out there in the forests of Germantown in 1789, with only Old Betsy between him and the wolves and coyotes and bears. Oh my.

The conservative justices weren't thinking of the reality of today's Germantown - and Carroll Park and Olney and Southwest Philadelphia. These urban neighborhoods, like scores of others in this nation, face far greater danger from unregulated guns than the Framers could have fathomed as they wrote the Second Amendment on Chestnut Street 229 years ago.

Government must not be denied the legal means to fight the epidemic of gun violence. No matter what Blackstone would do. *