One of the elephants in the room is why SCOTUS failed to clearly incorporate the 2nd Amendment against the states after the Civil War. I think it’s partly race, but also fear of immigrant mobs of Irish, Germans, Greeks, Italians and other “undesirables.”
One of the biggest was they feared another Civil War. The governments of the Southern states had resorted to, essentially, low level warfare against the occupation of the South by the radical Republicans and the Union Army.
After the hotly contested election of 1876, where the presidency ended up in the House of Representatives, a compromise was reached. The South would accept the Republican President, on condition the Union Troops be removed from the Southern states.
Enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment could very well have pushed the Republic back into open warfare.
So, the Supreme Court refused to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, and that lasted for a generation.
Was the question of the Second Amendment creating a personal right itself even resolved at that time? And if so, was the incorporation of that right ever before SCOTUS prior to Heller?