You might have thought the fierce public backlash that developed earlier in January when news broke of a planned effort by the federal Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) to regulate and eventually ban the use of gas stoves in the home broke in the media would have nixed that idea for now. But if you thought that, you would be wrong.

Despite the non-denial denial issued by CPSC Chairman Alexander Hoen-Sarcic shortly after the story broke, the controversy continued to bubble to the surface over the past two weeks. Commissioner Richard Trumka, Jr., whose comments were the germination point of the whole thing, seemed to back off on the matter during an interview with the Washington Post last week, while maintaining his concerns about use of gas stoves in the home.

“When you learn upsetting new information about something you’ve been around for a long time — maybe your whole life — you can never predict people’s reactions,” he said. “And there is going to be justifiable anger, and sometimes it’s misdirected.”

Perhaps this will spell an end to a federal effort to ban gas stoves, but no one should think efforts to ban their use are a dead idea. Quite to the contrary, such ban efforts are alive and well in various states and cities around the country.