One of the difficulties of several liberal vs. conservative policies is that the liberal ones are often at a disadvantage in apparent terms.

For example, racism exists in most part silently, whereas Affirmative Action and quotas are out in broad daylight; as a result, AA and quotas are very high-profile, whereas most racism, despite being far more prevalent and influential, hides from view.

This was brought to mind when a Facebook friend shared the story of a man whose life was very clearly saved by gun control. A woman had her gun confiscated by police because she did not have a license (something not required most of the time); the next day, the woman had a psychotic break, and used a knife to attack the writer of the post. He was stabbed twice, but was not seriously injured. Had there not been a requirement for a license, the police would have not been allowed to take her gun away, and the man would be dead. Luckily, this was in a state where a license is required; there are only 5 such states, and 40 have no requirement for permits or licenses whatsoever.

However, this is a rare case: the woman just happened to have been deprived of her weapon very recently, and the police happened to tell the victim about it.

In the vast majority of cases, gun control works in a way in which it can rarely if ever be definitively found to have saved any specific lives. As a result, anecdotes such as the ones above are extremely difficult to find.

On the other hand, when a person with a gun even suspects that their gun helped them, it gets trumpeted all over the Internet. There are endless anecdotes to be found; pro-gun sentiment and venomous spewing against gun control is incredibly pervasive over that medium.

The problem is, most of these are cases where there is an assumption that the firearm saved them, termed DGU, or “defensive gun use.” “That guy looked like trouble,” you will read, “but when I flashed my handgun under my jacket, he got scared and took off!” In such a case, there is no evidence that the gun stopped any actual event—just a feeling. Studies like those done by Gary Kleck include even the weakest data—such as, a man hears a sound outside his house, fires a warning shot, he sees nothing and nothing happens—as evidence of “defensive gun use,” which is then extrapolated to ridiculous effect. Furthermore, you know that most of these anecdotal reports are embellished to make the teller sound more heroic, and that cases in which firearms escalated situations and caused problems, you never hear people report that. This is the kind of “data” which is collected and used by gun advocacy groups to make “studies” which purportedly show that owning and carrying guns saves huge numbers of lives.

The thing is, no such report ever survived peer review intact; most if not all such studies are highly biased with severely flawed methodologies. However, it gets repeated, and strongly punctuated by anecdotal stories like the 83-year-old grandmother who fends off a street gang with a shotgun, or whatever.

It is unlikely that many will be able to report the specific effectiveness of gun control, despite its efficacy; it’s reporting about the dog that didn’t bark. Some criminal with a record for aggravated assault and murder tries to buy a gun, but gets arrested due to a background check. He goes to jail and never kills anyone again. How do the people who don’t get killed by this guy ever know they were saved? They don’t. And therefore, no anecdotal evidence. Or, at least, it is extremely rare, with only scattered stories like the one linked to above.

Despite the lack of persuasive anecdotal evidence for the effectiveness of gun control, the figures supporting it are significant and convincing.

Between 1994 and 2010, at least 118,000 gun sales to wanted criminals have been stopped by background checks; during the same time, 1,034,000 convicted felons and 291,000 people with histories of domestic abuse tried to buy guns and were blocked by background checks. In total, over 2,000,000 illicit gun purchases have been stopped, an average of more than 62,000 per year—and that is with many weaknesses built into the program, weaknesses demanded by the NRA and other gun advocates.

The number of criminals trying to buy guns who were arrested because background checks does not seem to be available, but some figures are. For example, a background check instituted in Virginia has caused 1355 fugitives to be caught and arrested over a 20-year period; extrapolated to the population of the entire country, that would be the equivalent of 52,000 fugitives arrested over a 20-year period, about 2600 per year. In addition, the same state, in 2009 alone, arrested 856 individuals for violations related to background checks, which would amount to 32,000 per year nationwide.

So, with checks, every year, 62,000 illicit gun sales stopped, 32,000 arrests for illicit purchase attempts, 2600 wanted fugitives put in jail.

You want to argue that this does not/would not result in thousands of lives saved every year?

The problem is, since it works preventively—and because conservatives have fought hard to suppress any such research or reporting of numbers—it is impossible to say how many have been saved by the relatively weak, loophole-ridden process that we currently have.

Imagine what we could do if we have actual gun control—nationwide, closed loopholes, emphasis on availability to legal owners but with added requirements for safety and proficiency training… not to mention measures to help track down people who actually committed gun crimes.