Ask yourself the question: if the American Empire had militarily confronted the Nazis over the Sudeten territories – would the Imperial Japanese have destroyed the unprepared American navy? When was the right time to intervene? Was it in 1936 or earlier, when the American public might well have removed the warmongering Roosevelt from office for getting America into the affairs of Europe, and suffering a major military defeat? Was it in 1938-1939, while England still was unprepared and Russia even less so?
Ask ourselves the question today (2022): when was the right time to intervene against the Soviet Union? Was it in the late 1990s, when they were starting to backslide, killing the Chechens? Was it in the 2000s in Georgia, the 2010s in Syria and Ukraine Round 1/Crimea and Donbas? At what point would Vladimir Putin not use a tactical nuke? At what point would Europe not go cold in the winter, and the world suffer a massive inflation? At what point would American and allied lives not be lost? At what point would Putin stop? (so far, the answer is never)
Consider the matter of red-flag laws and gun control in general. Of the hundreds of people served with orders, how many of them actually were deterred from violence by taking their guns? How would we measure this, against the fact that people like Gary Willis put up a fight in response to the order (and more generally, the repeated incidents of violent crime by people who have been served with a protective order)? To what extent do these laws cause people to come into conflict with the law, vs. punishing or preventing imminent violence? Other examples: Waco and Ruby Ridge; the FBI and ATF provoke fights and people on all sides of the conflict wind up dead. When the University of Virginia is summoning Christopher Darnell Jones to an apparent disciplinary process for a concealed weapons violation, did they prevent him from becoming a shooter? On average, is their approach of punishing students who commit crimes off campus, reducing the number of violent incidents?
We should bear in mind that in general, predicting human behavior is not a matter in which certainty can be obtained. In such risky situations, in which there are substantial reasons to believe that any of the given options could provoke a violent response, we should not think that we are going to be able to manipulate these people so precisely. At best, these are a proposition of averages, or governed by principles established for other reasons, hence we are not claiming to have such predictive power.