During a Q&A session with the Los Angeles Times, gun control proponent Micheal Bloomberg claimed the number of American gun deaths exceeds the entire history of American military deaths.

He offered no substantiation for this claim. Rather, he just interjected it into the dialogue, then moved on to the next point.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg admitted that gun control at the federal level is not going to happen anytime in the foreseeable future. He then talked about his efforts to circumvent Washington DC by going directly to the states via ballot initiatives and state legislatures. But his wins at the state level have been scarce at best, and one of his few wins–Nevada–was blocked by Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt.

Bloomberg claimed that roughly 31,000 Americans will be killed this year with “illegal handguns.” He offered no substantiation for this claim, but seems to be assuming that a gun legally purchased, then used in crime, is an “illegal” handgun. But he cannot support this claim. After all the effort and money he spent to be sure Americans must go through background checks in order to acquire guns, he cannot then call those guns “illegal” simply because empirical evidence shows background checks fail to stop determined attackers.

Bloomberg told the Times that the number of American gun deaths exceeds the entire history of American military deaths. He said, “There have been more people killed with illegal handguns than soldiers that have died since the Revolutionary War through today in defense of our country.” Again, he provided no substantiation for this claim. But it should be noted that the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP) made the same claim in 2015. The claim was wrong then and it is wrong now.

CAP tweeted:

Just since Reagan more Americans have been killed by gun violence in our communities than in every American war, ever pic.twitter.com/GX8XGnuTVn — CAP Action Guns (@CAPActionGuns) September 21, 2015

On September 26, 2015, Breitbart News pointed out CAP’s claim that the number of “gun-related deaths in the United States from 1989 to 2014 [was] 836,290.” They juxtaposed this with their claim that the “total U.S. military killed in war from 1776 to 2015 [was] 656,397.” The problem with this claim is that over 600,000 Americans were killed in the Civil War alone. And consider the the deaths from World War I–approx. 115,000, World War II–418,000, Korea–35,000, and Vietnam–58,000. At this point we have already reached 1,226,000 American military deaths and have not even added the deaths from the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Spanish / American War, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and others.

The bottom line: American gun deaths do not even come close to the number of deaths Americans have endured in their relentless fight for freedom.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.