“Barack Obama visiting victims of 2012 Aurora shooting” by Pete Souza – White House Flickr Account. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.
Right-wing hysteria rules the day despite that there are actual facts surrounding domestic gun violence as opposed to terrorism.
Many racist conservatives are pushing to close America’s borders and mosques, create a national registry for Muslims and worse in the wake of recent terror attacks, completely ignoring domestic gun violence at the hands of Americans.
On October 1, 2015 President Obama asked news organizations to compare the number of Americans killed by gun violence and by terrorism the last ten years in the wake of the Oregon shooting.
“I would ask news organizations — because I won’t put these facts forward — have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on your news reports,” the president stated during a fiery speech, adding: “We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?”
Since that time, the world has seen several acts of terrorism – the most concerning i possibly the recent deadly Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed and 368 injured, as many as 99 seriously. Those attacks were the deadliest in France since World War II and the deadliest in the European Union since the Madrid train bombings of 2004.
Since that attack, governors of more than half of U.S. states have now said they won’t accept additional refugees from Syria, although states cannot actually bar immigrants.
Republican presidential hopefuls and other party members were quick to weigh in on the matter. In a series of statements and interviews, front-runner Donald Trump said he would “seriously consider” closing Mosques – then later said America had no choice but to do so. He also called on a national registry for Muslims – even suggesting that they be required to wear some kind of badge to readily identify them. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz are calling for some sort of religious test to limit refugee immigration to those who are Christian. Speaking to Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” Ben Carson said that taking in refugees “from that area of the world I think is a huge mistake.… To bring them over here, under these circumstances, is a suspension of intellect,” and would ignore “the reason the human brain has these big frontal lobes, as opposed to other animals.” The list goes on an on.
In light of these ongoing calls for the persecution of Syrian refugees, it seems relevant to – once again – address the issue of the number of people killed by gun violence versus the number killed by terrorism.
For the purposes of this article, we will look only to the total number of domestic instances of Americans killed by terrorism.
We will begin with a PolitiFact review of the accuracy of a viral NowThis News meme from October 2015 stating: “Number of Americans killed by terrorism in the last decade: 24. Number of Americans killed by guns in the last decade: 280,024.” As NowThis News told PolitiFact, it’s more apt to compare domestic gun deaths to domestic terrorism deaths. Counting terrorist attacks abroad would be like comparing apples to oranges.
As PolitiFact reports, the first number came from “nonpartisan think tank the New America Foundation’s count of lethal jihadist attacks on U.S. soil from 2005 to 2015. It includes for example the four people killed during the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and the 13 deaths from the Fort Hood shooting in 2009.” However, Politifact raised that figure to 71 deaths from terrorist attacks on U.S. soil after talking to a spokesperson for New America who pointed out that “it would have been more accurate to include lives lost to both jihadist and non-jihadist extreme violence (47 deaths from 2005 to 2015).”
Reviewing the second number, PolitiFact reports that: “To get to 280,024 gun deaths, NowThis compiled data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System and the Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowd-sourced project that tallies deaths and injuries in mass shootings,” adding that: “According to the CDC, the number of violent gun deaths between 2005 and 2013 (the latest year on record) was 279,976. That includes suicides, homicides, and police-related shootings. Mass Shooting Tracker counts 389 mass shooting gun deaths in 2014 and 375 so far in 2015.”
However, that number was also too low. PolitiFact notes that “Mass Shooting Tracker, as the name implies, only tracks deaths from mass shootings, defined by the group as when four more people are shot in an event. If we look at all gun-related deaths as the CDC does from the past two years, the numbers are much higher. According the nonprofit project the Gun Violence Archive, there were 12,562 gun deaths in 2014 and 9,959 in 2015 thus far.”
So according to PolitiFact’s analysis, “That’s a grand total of 301,797 firearm-related deaths in the past decade, compared to 71 deaths from domestic acts of terrorism,” and as PolitiFact also points out: “If we factor in terrorist attacks overseas, the comparison is still stark. From 2004 to 2014, 303 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks worldwide, according to State Department reports. During that same time frame, 320,523 Americans were killed because of gun violence.”
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