Currently, the gun control debate is actually surviving the short attention span of the mainstream media and forcing both individuals and elected officials to decide what they think and then defend it.
The opposite is true, the mainstream media is pushing this crap because DNC 2018 has a strategy of running on gun control, but of course gun control is not that popular, so they have an all out media blitz that may very well last until November. Hopefully it backfires.
The problem is the anti civil rights folks define the debate, so they talk about the number who choose guns for suicide and the number of gang murders and accidents as if they are all the same thing and call it "gun violence", that shuts down debate on how to address those individual and different problems and leads to only a debate about gun laws, gun laws which can never solve any of those individual problems. They talk about the number killed and how guns make it easy killed but have you ever seen them talk about the number saved and how easy guns make it to protect?