There’s an old joke about a guy who loses his watch in the weeds but looks for it on the sidewalk because “I’d never find it in the weeds.”

That provides a perfect parallel to the efforts of gun-control advocates.

The perpetrators of gun violence tend to be gang members and other unsavory types who are not easily brought under the purview of the law.

But many of the laws regulating guns target people who are highly unlikely to use their guns in robberies and other forms of crime.

This is the core of the fight between liberals and conservatives over the Second Amendment right to bear arms. And it’s also the core issue in a case that is now before the United States Supreme Court.

The case, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association vs. City of New York, concerns a law stating that residents possessing firearms could transport them only to the seven shooting ranges located within the city limits.

Oral arguments were heard Monday. From the way the debate went, it seemed that five of the nine justices on the court were of the opinion that the law represents a violation of the Second Amendment.

But over the summer the city repealed the law and the state passed a law removing the city’s power to reimpose it. That permitted the attorney for the city, Richard Dearing, to argue that the case should be dismissed as moot because the law is no longer on the books.

Justice Sam Alito argued the case is not moot because the law still on the books permits gun owners to travel with their locked and unloaded guns only if the trip is “continuous and uninterrupted.”

The Jersey-born justice then asked Dearing, “Suppose that after that, one of the plaintiffs had made a trip to a firing range in, let's say, New Jersey and, while there, decided to stop to visit his mother for a couple of hours to take care of a few things for her. Would there be any law that that would violate?”

Dearing replied that such questions are irrelevant because they were not brought up in the litigation prior to Monday.

“So why is this case moot?” Alito asked.

Alito didn’t mention the New Jersey case that brought up that question of visiting your mother. But if he was following the political news in his native Trenton, he was probably aware of the case of Brian Aitken, who was arrested in 2009 after police found three legally owned handguns locked in his car trunk after he visited his mother in Burlington County.

The case became a cause célèbre after Aitken was sentenced to seven years in prison under the New Jersey law on transporting weapons, which is similar to New York’s. After Aitken served four months, then-Gov. Chris Christie commuted his sentence. (Check the site of the New Jersey Second Amendment Society, which led the fight to free Aitken.)

Christie also pardoned Meg Fellenbaum, a Pennsylvania woman arrested for transporting legally-owned weapons unloaded and locked in her car trunk.

That case was similar to a hypothetical case that came up in the Monday arguments. The lawyer representing the gun owners, Paul Clement, argued that under current law a gun owner could still be arrested for stopping for a cup of coffee while traveling with unloaded guns locked in the car trunk.

Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the court’s four liberals, scoffed at that prospect and asked the city’s lawyer whether that could happen.

“The Police Department has affirmed and we have made clear that - the enforcement position is that a stop for a cup of coffee is not a problem,” Dearing said.

Maybe coffee’s okay in New York. But what about pulling to the side of the road to send a text in New Jersey? That’s what Fellenbaum did that got her charged with a felony carrying a five-year sentence. Christie later pardoned her as well.

The gun-control crowd doesn’t ask for my opinion, but I’ll give them it anyway: Don’t pass laws mandating penalties for transporting a gun that are similar to penalties like those for actually using that gun in a crime.

That’s just inviting the Supreme Court to step in and sort things out.

Now that the Second Amendment literalist Brett Kavanaugh has replaced moderate Anthony Kennedy as the swing vote on the court, it seems like just a matter of time before New Jersey and New York see their highly restrictive approaches to gun possession declared unconstitutional.

Maybe then they’ll go back to fighting crime by going after criminals instead of gun owners.