evidence: After the Supreme Court's decision in Bruen, the relevance of this evidence, and thus of the real effects of gun laws on people's lives, is limited. Bruen diminished the paper's legal significance, so an empirical legal paper had to become something else. In this case, an empirical paper became more about challenging the story or paradigm underlying the legal rationale. We ultimately found a lack of support for any positive effect of waiting period restrictions for handgun purchases on suicide or homicide rates, which suggests a poor fit between the law and the outcome variables of interest. From the empirical results, our paper argues that most waiting period restrictions misconstrue the reality on the ground or at least focus on the wrong paradigm, with most gun-related deaths in America in 2020 being suicides (54%). The paper argues that the law would be better served by rejecting the common-law concept of a cooling-off period to prevent impulsive acts, and instead focusing on another paradigm. [...] Finally, our paper raises the question of how to handle a gun regulation that may have historical support and thus be constitutional under Bruen, but would not be constitutional under intermediate scrutiny because it has little to no effect. Although it is doubtful that any waiting period restriction is sufficiently similar to historic gun regulation, at least one state has employed waiting-period-type restrictions since the 1920s. Our paper raises the question of whether historically supported but possibly ineffectual gun regulations are permissible under Bruen.