Re: NSA billions vs. how much for crime? Chasing ghosts & letting your own people rot.
That's an awful lot of upvotes for a post that had no actual quantitative information in it, so I went looking.
Best I could find from various sources on teh intarwebs was that on average about 11.5 thousand people are actually killed by firearms in the domestic US per year. So that would be "Ten of thousand". It is generally thought that many of those are suicides. The exact number is disputed but never lower than a third.
Discussion point: do suicides count as "gun crime"? On paper, yes. Morally? My view is that the most precious thing you own is your life, but it is yours to switch off if you want so long as you don't kill or harm anyone else. Of course, the maid that comes to clean up your hotel room* will need therapy that she won't get because she's poor as a churchmouse, but there you go. It's often said that suicide is a selfish crime.
Deaths from terror attacks amount to less than ten thousand in the Domestic US per year if you don't count those still dying from the toxic fallout of the collapse of the Twin Towers. But we can agree it is less per year than gun violence. Not sure why this is important. Terrorism is something The People feel Should Not Be, while guns are regarded as A Fundamental Right Woven Into The Country's History. Were I a politician, no matter what my personal views I know what my publicly avowed stance would be.
But your comment about it being about money is both *on* the money and naive. The way the Federal and State government does business makes *everything* about money. You want to know where the money that "government wastes" is spent? Look no further than the local contractors that government is all-too often forced by law to offer the jobs to, and who - inspired by the "low bid" system that encourages bad behaviour - gouge and overbill and lie until everything collapses under the weight of yet another "public inquiry". It is, when you get down to it, the American Way.
* I once did some research and discovered that upscale hotels are a very popular venue for people wishing to go out "with the minimum of fuss". I guess it does save the family the distress of discovering your body, and who care about strangers anyway?