… If we really want to compare wartime casualties to contemporary gun deaths, we should look at the Civil War, which had the most American casualties of any war in our nation’s history. …
The total number of Union soldiers killed by gunfire between 1861 and 1865 was somewhere around 90,000. Add the accepted estimates of Confederate battle casualties and we wind up somewhere south of 140,000 for the number who were killed on both sides during the war. Looking at the four years between 2011-2014, the total number of Americans killed by guns was 133,149, and adjusting to cover the same 50-month period of the Civil War would bring the contemporary gun death total to more than 140,000. CONT.
Mike Weisser, New York Times