You need to work from many difference perspectives.
Absolutely.
Legislation, while less likely, is more sweeping. The court battles are more of a long slog, with one calculated case after another designed to slowly erode the infringement upon rights.
This weekend, I had the oppurtunity to meet Clark Neily and Alan Gura, two of the attorneys on the legal teams of
Heller and
McDonald. Their approach were similar to Comm2A's in that they used careful, calulated, (and most importantly) sypathetic plaintiffs to get where they did.
The worst possible thing for the RKBA argument is if you have some guy who is using the 2nd Amendment as defense to the unlawful possesion charge he recieved while carjacking a family of four. It shouldn't matter, but it definately does.
What terraformer said and realize that the courts generally don't like to make big decisions. They prefer death by a thousand pin-pricks rather than rational, logical thinking that creates a big shift in legal thinking (even if they know damn well it's right).
This is why I was saying that regardless of what SCOTUS thought about POI it didn't want to open that can along side the 2A issue... Any significant decision on that issue shuts and/or opens a lot of doors all at once depending on where they come down.
Just look at "incorporation" itself - there's no ambiguity in the amendment that even hints of this absurd idea of piecemeal incorporation, but here we are 100+ years down the road of doing just that...
The courts shouldn't be in the business of making huge decisions--that's what generally separates judicial activists from those judges who properly exercise judicial restraint. Courts should decide only the legal issues presented in cases in front of them, and have no business over reaching to a particular result no matter how correct the opinion in the overreach might be.
As for piecemeal incorporation, blame the 5 jerkoffs at the Supreme Court who were the majority in the
Slaughterhouse Cases . Those guys royally screwed over American jurisprudence to this day, and Clarence Thomas seems to be the only one willing to right that wrong.