"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it..."
Guns and other culture war issues, like religion, abortion, gays, etc. are just distractions to divide the masses against each other so they don't unite and revolt. Until that happens, the large majorities that want things from the system will never get any of it.