On the night of November 17, I was at a bar mitzvah for the son of an officer of a top investment bank. It was a wonderful, lavish affair held for about 200 guests at a synagogue in Washington's affluent Cleveland Park neighborhood. There was a video tribute to the boy and a seated dinner served under pasha-style tents.

Across town that evening, another young man, Tim Spicer, was getting off work at Ben's Chili Bowl, in the U Street corridor, a neighborhood once known as the black Broadway because the likes of Duke Ellington performed there. I had become friends with Tim after years of eating at Ben's, a D.C. institution whose walls are adorned with photos of such famous customers as Bono and Bill Cosby. He was fantastically nice. He always helped me jump the line to get a half-smoke, my regular artery-clogging sausage. He would chat with my nine-year-old son and tell me about his aspirations. Tim had dropped out of high school, but he got his G.E.D. and wanted to attend Howard University. In his spare time, he rapped and drew fashion sketches. He hoped to start a clothing line, and we had talked about my investing in it.

As I was eating sushi at the synagogue, Tim was murdered. According to the police department's reconstruction of events, he was carjacked. The killer (or killers) drove away in Tim's souped-up 1994 Chevy Caprice, and Tim stumbled to a nearby Metro stop, where he died. He was 25 and a father.

Ten days later, I went to his funeral. Mourners wailed at his open casket. Speaker after speaker praised his kindness and asked God what was happening to so many young black men. Tim's murder was the 169th in D.C. in 2007, which gave it notoriety. The previous year, there had been 169 murders in the District, so each one after Tim's underscored the city's rising homicide rate. Police have yet to make an arrest or disclose the weapon that killed Tim, but odds are it was a handgun, the weapon of choice in American cities. (See where the 2008 presidential candidates stand on gun control.)

A few days after Tim was slain, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted District of Columbia v. Heller, a case about a law that was supposed to prevent murders like Tim's: D.C.'s ban on handguns, the country's strictest gun-control measure. Constitutional scholars, gun manufacturers, and gun-control advocates say this will be the most significant firearms case to come before the high court in almost 70 years. The court has assiduously avoided ruling on gun control since the 1930s, when it opened the door to regulation; suddenly it's deciding a case that could strike down many of the country's gun laws, affecting every firearm owner and manufacturer. How this case got to the Roberts court, and its coming as I dealt for the first time with a friend becoming a murder victim, made me ponder the prevalence of gun violence, the complexity of the issue's policy and politics, and why both sides, I think, miss the point.

It's easy for liberals to view the gun lobby as monolithic. In left-wing demonology, the National Rifle Association is regarded, along with Halliburton, as all-powerful. But the gun movement is more nuanced than that. In 2000, for instance, Smith & Wesson, the nation's largest gun manufacturer, broke with the rest of the gun industry and signed a settlement agreement with the Clinton administration in order to avoid lawsuits. The company, more than 150 years old, agreed to adopt numerous safety measures and change its sales practices. Smith & Wesson found itself vilified, subject to boycotts by weapons enthusiasts who believed it had sold out.

Indeed, District of Columbia v. Heller actually reached the court over the N.R.A.'s objections. Alan Gura, one of the lawyers challenging the ban, told me that the N.R.A. originally opposed bringing the case, fearing it could lead to a ruling that would establish a government right to regulate arms sales. The N.R.A. believes that its famously effective lobbying finds a more receptive forum in Congress and state legislatures than in the less predictable courts. Gun manufacturers—closely aligned with the N.R.A., especially since the Smith & Wesson boycott—also would rather have skipped the courts.

While the case has some surprising opponents, its advocates defy stereotyping too. Robert Levy, a scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, doesn't own a gun and doesn't want to. Still, as a libertarian, Levy had long nursed the idea of filing a lawsuit that would resolve the gun-control debate on the side of individuals who want to buy guns. Using the fortune he made in the securities industry, Levy financed the case, and rather than recruiting cliché gun nuts for plaintiffs, he enlisted a diverse group to bring the suit. One of them is a middle-aged gay man who bought a gun to defend himself from attacks by bigots.

District of Columbia v. Heller revolves around the question of whether D.C.'s gun ban is unconstitutional, a violation of the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The court could make a sweeping ruling about whether the Constitution allows individual gun ownership to be regulated at all. Last March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, considered to be the nation's second-highest court, ruled that the D.C. law was unconstitutional because the right to bear arms applies to all individuals, not just those in a militia, as the Second Amendment suggests.

No one knows what will happen with the case in the Roberts court, but I know what I would do. I have no personal interest in guns, and I'm agnostic as to whether gun bans really do anything to prevent crimes like the one that ended Tim's life. Obviously, the law in D.C. did not save Tim; it seems to have served only to disarm the law-abiding. I believe the District's ban is draconian: It holds that just current and retired police officers can own handguns. You can own a rifle, but it must be disassembled, making it impossible to use for self-defense. It seems crazy that the named litigant in the case, Dick Heller, who carries a handgun for his job as a guard at a courthouse, can't have one in his home because security guards are technically not police officers. It's one thing to regulate gun sales, but a flat-out ban seems like bad policy in terms of its effectiveness and whom it affects.

Still, I hope the court upholds the ban. It's overwhelmingly popular here; no D.C. council member wants it repealed. I'm not a lawyer, let alone a scholar, but I see no reason to interpret the Second Amendment as forbidding a jurisdiction from banning a particular weapon, whether it's an assault rifle or a handgun. As Linda Singer, D.C.'s former attorney general, told me, "Banning one particularly dangerous arm does not mean banning the right to bear arms." She notes that handguns are by far the predominant weapon used in murders and suicides in Washington and elsewhere. In 1976, the District's second year of autonomous home rule, the gun ban was one of the first laws passed, in part because all of the city's rapes in 1974 that involved a firearm were committed with a handgun.

In the wake of Tim's murder, it would be easy to give a knee-jerk liberal or conservative response: We need more gun control; we need less gun control. But the most important thing, to me anyway, is who decides. That ought to be the people of D.C., like Tim's grieving family, through their elected representatives. Tim's life is too precious to be reduced to either side's talking point.