It didn’t take many calls over the weekend to leave us with the impression that Mayor Bloomberg is mistaken in his assertion that the Supreme Court’s decision on the right to keep a gun is not going to have an impact on New York’s regulation of guns. It is true that the Supreme Court ruled on only one case, ordering the District of Columbia to issue a permit to Dick Heller to enable him to keep his pistol in his home. But the interpretation that the court gave to the Second Amendment — that it is an individual, civil right — was so ringing that it immediately was greeted with lawsuits against the most restrictive jurisdictions in the country. These started with Chicago and San Francisco. It is hard to imagine that New York is not going to be the target of suits as well.

That is the outlook sketched in the adjacent columns by one of the savviest figures on the Second Amendment beat, Dave Kopel of the Cato Institute. He points out that prohibition against infringing the right to keep and bear arms in New York State is not part of the state constitution but of the state’s civil rights law. The language is essentially identical to the Second Amendment of the Constitution. No doubt the authors of the state’s civil rights law knew what they were doing by including the right to bear arms in a section of the state’s laws dealing with civil rights. And the way to think of opposition to the changes that will be coming in the wake of Heller is to think of it as hostility to full civil rights for New Yorkers.

And why should New Yorkers enjoy these rights any less than residents of, say, Connecticut, where it is possible to obtain a license to carry a concealed handgun? The Supreme Court appeared to leave some room for reasonable regulation, suggesting that guns might be banned in, say, schools or government buildings. But the general mind-set and regulatory regime that makes it all but impossible for an ordinary, law-abiding adult to carry a pistol in New York City will logically come under challenge in the wake of Heller. The ideal thing would be to see the governor, the mayor, the corporation counsel, and the police commissioner get ahead of this curve and lead an effort to bring the city’s regulations and practices in line with Heller.

Certainly they don’t want to get in the position of resisting one of the most important civil rights rulings ever to issue from the high bench. In the case of what is probably the greatest civil rights ruling — Brown v. Board of Education — the court used the term “all deliberate speed” to express the pace at which it wanted schools desegregated. It opened an era of resistance that was the shame of the nation. We don’t suggest for a moment that Mayor Bloomberg is like, say, Governor Faubus or Governor Wallace. He is not a bigot in any way, and he believes in civil rights. And he believes in the law. The hard part for him is going to be coming to an understanding that what was at stake in Heller was not the issue on which he has been campaigning — illegal guns — but the civil rights of ordinary citizens.

One of the civil rights leaders in the vanguard of this struggle, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, reacted to Heller by saying: “I consider this the opening salvo in a step-by-step process of providing relief for law-abiding Americans everywhere that have been deprived of this freedom.” There is no reason why the freedom vouchsafed by the Second Amendment and New York State’s own civil rights law — and affirmed by the Supreme Court last week — can’t be enjoyed by the people of our city. They are as law abiding, as adult, as responsible, as American as the citizens of any other city and state where this civil right is taken as a matter of course. Heller is an occasion for our leaders to start treating their constituents as such.