The Guns-Terrorism Nexus

As of Monday morning, the death toll of Sunday’s massacre at an Orlando nightclub stood at 50 including the assailant, making the attack not only the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, but also the deadliest terrorist attack in

the United States since September 11, 2001. The toll was more than triple that of the next-deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11, the San Bernardino shooting of December 2015, in which 14 people were killed. And the weapons used in Orlando, as in San Bernardino, were guns. 

Firearms have a long but not straightforward history in terrorist attacks in the United States and around the world. In 2012, The New Yorker’s Jill Leporereported that “The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world,” with Yemen ranking a distant second. Yet according to an analysis of the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), a comprehensive dataset on more than 140,000 terrorist attacks worldwide since 1970, guns appear less frequently as the primary weapon in terrorist attacks in the United States than in those committed elsewhere in the world.