We have mountains of evidence that proves that tighter gun regulations lower gun deaths. Nobody is so laughably naive as to think laws are only effective or valuable if they never fail.

This widespread assumption that people will just find other ways to produce the same results is incorrect. That's not what happens. Suicide rates drop drastically when guns aren't available. Shooting sprees result in far fewer deaths when automatic weapons are not available. Shootings in and of themselves decrease dramatically when firearms are not easy to come by. These things have been shown time and time again in the research, so why do people keep appealing to assumptions like this?

All we have to do is put informed and effective barriers up so that it takes more work to get the guns and they become less available to people who shouldn't have them.

Effective gun control would give us universal backgrounds checks for absolutely all sales that check against a federal registry to which all states are required to submit all their records. It would require a longer waiting period for a license and additional waiting periods for permits for each firearm purchased. That license would be revoked with conviction of certain crimes or certain mental health assessments. It would also legislate certain storage requirements and require reporting if stolen, with a criminal charge if a non-reported stolen gun were used in the commission of a crime. It would require taking safety and skills courses and passing a skills and knowledge test as well as a mental health check. Etc., etc. Most of these things are already in place in places like Canada, Switzerland, Australia, etc., and they work very well.