It is darkly humorous that the US Government is freaking out over five vaping deaths, but the weekly shooting sprees have led to zero new gun restrictions at the national level.
Meanwhile there's tons of real low hanging fruit with thousands and tens of thousands of lives at stake that never get any national dialogue at all because it's not outrageous, controversial, or politically advantageous enough to make it in the news like vape deaths and mass shooting deaths are.
If you are looking to prevent gun suicides (which constitutes nearly 2/3 of that 40,000 deaths figure you quoted), you would see more handgun-related regulations and initiatives being proposed. Not to mention the vast majority of gun homicides are committed with a handgun.
Yet, handguns are almost never mentioned in the gun debate, which always politically swirls around mass shootings. It's always AR-15s and "assault weapons" and "mental health checks" and "bump stocks" that get national scrutiny, not the real killer (depressed people using handguns and sane criminals using handguns).
It's disingenuous to use a high hanging fruit problem to pretend like you are solving a low hanging fruit problem.
My stance on guns is that handguns should be much harder to obtain than rifles and shotguns. And even then, every handgun sale should come with a mandatory suicide prevention pamphlet. I bet that would lower overall gun deaths (suicides/homicides) way more than "assault weapons bans" and "enhanced background checks" and "bump stock bans" which would basically do nothing to lower mass shooting death counts.