Preventive gun laws are about the prevented tragedies that you don't see
I had a couple of conversations about the shooting in Alabama and a story I posted here on DU about a 9 year old that was fatally shot.
In discussions about gun laws, it always gets brought up that gun laws didn't prevent shooters from committing these atrocities. They can always point to some number to say 'X' amount of people died from gun violence and if those people were armed they could have defended themselves, or that these laws do nothing but make it harder for law abiding gun owners.
As an example of these laws not working that I heard from a gentleman this morning was drunk driving laws and how that, unfortunately, didn't prevent his son from dying in a drunk driving accident.
Although there will be people to will ignore the law regardless, what about the prevented tragedies that you don't see? The force of law and a public health campaign helped to steer people to safer choices. We can't count the many times someone has hailed a cab or called an Uber after a night at the bar. We can't count how many people were designated drivers, and remained sober to drive everyone else home. Those are the prevented tragedies of the law and a good public health message. We don't have any data that shows when people choose to call someone to come pick them up after drinking rather than drive themselves. Those are near impossible to count. It's easy to count to the times that drunk driving laws didn't work because you can count the people who are injured or worse. You can count the number of wrecked cars. You can quantify the damage.
The same applies to gun laws. We can't count all of the prevented tragedies. We can't count each time a tragedy is prevented as a result of instituting a waiting period. We can't count how many crimes of passion that were prevented by making a firearm slightly harder to access. It's nearly, or entirely, impossible to count the many times a gun-related crime doesn't happen as a result of these laws.
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