But aren't the lasers already being fired regardless if you're looking or not

Another classic case of "Scientists are bad at naming things"

Some people will spend their entire lives thinking math is stupid because of imaginary numbers.

Thinking that electrons behave differently when you "look" at them.

Think that radio towers and microwaves cause cancer because they emit radiation

Many of these are failures of the education system and to be fair scientists don't have the power of hindsight. Still it annoys me how inefficient it is having these names

The problem with how you are describing it is that it's not that the physical mechanics of measurement are necessarily causing collapse as if you end up erasing the persistent information about the measurement it reverses the collapse, such as if you add a polarizer to the other slit as well or add a polarizer downstream that untags the initial measurement.

So in your example, if you simultaneously shoot a bunch of BBs at empty space next to the pile of glass cards where they could have been, or discard the BBs which reflected measuring the cards in the first place, suddenly the pile of glass cards reassemble themselves.

Attempts to try and dismiss the 'weirdness' of the measurement problem or QM behavior IMO ultimately do the reader more of a disservice than a service.