In this year alone in the United States, 6,427 Americans have thus far been killed as a result of gun violence, and another 12,643 have been wounded. Of those numbers, 1,614 of those were children ages 17 and younger. And 92 of those deaths occurred in the last 72 hours.

Having lost my own father as a result of an act of terrorism in downtown Saigon during the Vietnam War, I think that I possess sufficient enough standing to say that we are our own worst enemies. And while I don't mean to minimize the threat posed by foreign terrorists, I believe that we'd likely be far better off -- and safer -- over the long term, were we to engage in some serious efforts to mitigate and reduce our own home-grown carnage.

Instead, we're allowing ourselves to be repeatedly scared schittless by the prospect of terror abroad, while ignoring the very real and everyday threats we face from people just like us, who reside within our own communities.

If we can't even be honest with ourselves about a serious problem that has cost over 280,000 U.S. residents their lives over the last ten years, what makes us think that our efforts to suppress terror abroad will have any meaningful effect?