At first I thought you meant Happy Gilmore. Then I realized you must mean Jim Gilmore. Then I was like "Wait, Jim Gilmore is running?"
Carson's usually sounds batshit crazy, but in this case I think he might be right, unless he (and I) are conflating different unrelated lists. From what I've read there's no due process involved in getting on a watch list and it can happen just from having a similar name to a terrorist.
Oh, and is it fair that terrorists can acquire automatic rifles on the black market and we can't acquire legal ones to protect ourselves from them with? Although that's probably a bad idea.
According to the CDC, in 2013, there were 11,208 homicides by firearms in the USA in 2013, along with 21,175 suicides by firearm (total 32,383 firearm deaths, I assume nothing is counted in both categories), major cardiovascular disease killed 796,494 people in the US in 2013, and malignant neoplasms (e.g. cancer) killed 584,881. Source:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdfTerrorism, by comparison:
- Deaths from terrorism increased 80% last year to the highest level ever, with 32,658 people killed, compared to 18,111 in 2013.
- Boko Haram and ISIL were jointly responsible for 51% of all claimed global fatalities in 2014.
- 78% of all deaths and 57% of all attacks occurred in just five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria.
Getting even more guns (or automatic guns, or machine guns, etc) is probably not going to help us reduce our already low terrorism death count in the US (18 deaths!), and we're suffering numbers of firearm deaths roughly equal to what the entire world suffered from terrorism in 2014, and it took an 80% increase in deaths from terrorism in 2014 to even bring terrorism's world death count up to the same place the US's firearms death count is at... I am, of course, assuming that US firearms deaths haven't changed drastically in 2014. The 2013 firearm deaths are the last year the CDC has figures for, but they've been fairly stable, iirc. You can verify in the CDC link above, I believe.