Keeping the gun issue alive?

Here's an interesting piece (from American Spectator) about the Democratic Party's response to the Heller decision. From the article:

THAT BRINGS US to the most prominent Illinois Democrat of them all. Barack Obama has spent most of his career in the hardcore anti-gun category. He was the Democrat quoted above who said "I don't believe that people should be able to own guns," according to scholar John Lott, who met Obama in the mid-'90s.

That's one of many highlights in Obama's long anti-gun record. But since he's now running for president, Obama has retreated to safer political territory, implausibly claiming that "The Supreme Court has now endorsed" what Obama has "always believed."

Obama emphasized, like Schumer and Pelosi, that "Justice Scalia himself acknowledged that this right is not absolute and subject to reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe." His clear preference is to move on from this subject.

He could get away with it. Congressional Quarterly blogger Taegan Goddard suggests that by making it harder to take away your guns, the Supreme Court has made it harder for Republicans to mobilize gun owners.

(emphasis mine). For the record, I am uncomfortable with political gamesmanship along the lines of "keeping issues alive" for the sake of winning elections. That being said, the last sentence above jumped out at me because it seems that a 5-4 vote on a Supreme Court ruling as controversial as this sustains--if not increases, the importance of elections involving a supreme-court-justice-appointing president and a supreme-court-justice-consenting senate.