The NRA has been sending the following ad far and wide to get the gunloons excited about guns and overall gun looniness. It actually conceptualizes the average American good ole boy standing up to ISIS and blowing them all away with their freely purchased guns. It’s pure fantasy, and with the inimitable Charlie Daniels sneering for the camera, who can resist it, right?

This vision for America is nothing but pure fantasy. And terrorists aren’t a problem for us at the moment. While gunloons are fantasizing about using their guns to blow away brown invaders intent on killing our way of life, real American gun owners are producing a lot of pure carnage on our own people. Sometimes, you just have to look at the raw numbers to understand the severity of a problem.

No matter what Charlie Daniels says, we have a serious gun problem here, and the way to solve it is to make guns just a little harder for bad people to get, and to make responsible gun owners responsible for their guns. But first, we have to look at the problem. Sometimes, you just have to look at the raw numbers to understand the severity of a problem.

In the United States:

Between 2005 and 2015, a total of 71 Americans were killed in terrorist attaclks. On the other hand, during the same period, 301,797 Americans were killed as a result of gun violence. (Source) If you look at the period from 1999-2014, 497,632 have been killed by guns. That’s behind motor vehicle deaths, which killed 628,016 people, but then, over the last few years, tens of millions of cars have been recalled for safety problems, and all cars have to be fitted with safety cages, seatbelts and airbags. (Source) Also, according to recent figures from the CDC, gun deaths are catching up. Motor vehicle deaths have been dropping as we make cars safer, while gun deaths stay steady becauase we do nothing. (Source)

Last year alone, 100 metro areas saw a mass shooting, defined as four or more people being shot, regardless of fatalities. Since 2013, Austin, Texas is the only major city (400,000 population and up) to not experience a mass shooting incident. (Source)

Since Sandy Hook, a child under 12 has been shot and killed every other day, on average. Most of those who have been killed at the hand of another have been killed by a family member, not a stranger. (Source)

While NRA gunloons will assure us all that “responsible gun owners” are not a problem, somehow, in 2015, toddlers got hold of guns and shot 50 people (as of October). (Source)

The national firearm death rate nationwide was 10.3 per 100,000 in 2014.

The states with the highest firearm death rate (2014, per 100,000):

Alaska – 19.2

Louisiana – 19.0

Mississippi – 18.3

Alabama – 16.9

Arkansas – 16.6

Wyoming – 16.2

Montana –16.1

New Mexico– 16.0

Oklahoma – 15.7

South Carolina – 15.5

Obviously, these numbers demonstrate that the states with the most guns and lax gun laws have the biggest problem. (Source)

Compared to other countries, we have many more deaths than every one of the countries with strict gun control. In fact, it’s not even close. Using figures from 2010, our firearm death rate of 10.2 (per 100,000 population) and our firearm homicide rate of 3.6 dwarf those of other nations. The second-highest firearm homicide rate is a tie between Finland and Canada, at 0.5, which means we’re 7 times higher. When it comes to overall firearm death rate, ours is more than 50 times higher than the UK and 10 times higher than Australia, who saw one mass shooting 20 years ago, took action and solved their problem. (Source)

Compare our rate of firearm ownership with select other countries:

United States – 88.8 guns per 100 people

Yemen – 54.8 (second-highest in the world)

Switzerland – 45.7

Sweden – 31.6

France – 31.2

Canada – 30.8

Austria – 30.4

Germany – 30.3

Czech Republic – 16.3

Australia – 15.0

Spain – 10.4

Ukraine – 6.6

Poland – 1.3 (Source)

The numbers speak for themselves, although one more interesting statistic should be noted; only about half of all families have a gun in the home, which means many families have two or more. Even more frightening is that 6 million American homes have 10 or more firearms. (Source). And because of our lax gun laws, we’re just supposed to trust them.

If so many people were dying from any other consumer product, we’d demand answers. In fact, when it comes to motor vehicles, we require manufacturers to include many safety features and we require drivers to keep small children in car seats and that all parents be buckled up. And it works; traffic deaths have been dropping, even though the population has been increasing. However, when it comes to guns, we treat them as a sacred cow. The first step to fixing a problem is to acknowledge it. Here is the acknowledgment that we have a problem. It’s time to fix it.