In the aftermath of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting that left 50 people dead and 53 wounded, many have called for increased restrictions to obtain firearms for people on government terrorist watch lists. As we struggle to untangle the shooter’s motives, his possible links to organized terror groups has strengthened fears in many Americans and reignited calls to keep guns out of suspected terrorists’ hands.

But in the midst of this understandable panic, it’s important to realize that the vast majority of firearms deaths in the United States have no links to terrorism – and the numbers aren’t even close.

In 2013, the latest year for which we have comprehensive data available, according to the CDC 33,169 people died from illegal gun violence in the US alone.  This was 1.3% of the total deaths in the country! Even if we discounted suicides by gun, which numbered 21,175, we still end up with approximately 12,000 deaths from homicides and accidents. That’s approximately 33 people killed per day.

Contrast this with terrorism: in all of 2013, 21 Americans lost their lives to international terrorism.

These numbers just don’t add up. Even if every single terror attack on a US citizen was made possible due to ownership of a gun (which we know it isn’t: the September 11 attack was carried out with box cutters for weapons), and even if we could stop every single potential terrorist from acquiring a gun (which we couldn’t, even if we expanded our watch lists and criteria) we would, at best, stop somewhere around 25 or 30 murders in an average year.

Which is less than one-quarter of one percent.

Now don’t get me wrong – any decrease in gun deaths is a goal worth investigating. But targeted watch-lists are never going to be perfect, and they’re never going to stop all potential terrorists from obtaining guns, and most importantly they’re going to do almost nothing to dent our gun violence problem that is largely committed by average Americans living normal American lives.

What we do need is more research, more understanding of why people commit gun violence and how to stop it before it happens. Many doctors are already trying to help with this, but unfortunately there are laws in place keeping us from collecting data to better understand the problem. Rather than focus on flawed watch lists that target a tiny percentage of gun violence cases, we should look at those laws preventing better research and find a way to change them.