Guns kill more Americans than terrorists do

Let’s look at guns first. Firearms killed more than 346,681 people between 2003 and 2013, the last year for which numbers were available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the same period, terrorist attacks killed 312 US citizens, according to data from the US State Department and the Council on Foreign Affairs.

That’s an average of 28 people a year. Compare that to the average of 31,516 gun deaths each year. In 2013, guns killed nearly twice as many people in the United States as terrorists did worldwide. And of those gun deaths, many—more than half in 2013—were suicides, not homicides.