Time To Get Outta Dodge
Stolen from Renee
"10:16AM - Subject: Statistics
Sent to me by someone who serves:Regardless of where you stand on the issue of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, here's a sobering statistic. There has been a monthly average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2,112 deaths. That gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers. The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000 persons for the same period. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the U.S. Capital than you are in Iraq. Conclusion: The U.S. should pull out of Washington."
"10:16AM - Subject: Statistics
Sent to me by someone who serves:Regardless of where you stand on the issue of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, here's a sobering statistic. There has been a monthly average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2,112 deaths. That gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers. The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000 persons for the same period. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the U.S. Capital than you are in Iraq. Conclusion: The U.S. should pull out of Washington."
posted by waltzingmathilda @ 1:54 PM
3 Comments:
At 4:17 PM,
Anonymous said…
From somebody responding to that e-mail (which got its origins somewhere other than a legit site as those gun numbers for our nation's Cities are not reported in such a way as to nake an accurate comparison) on http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=594867. Also, having reported on Philly's crime rate when it came out that the police department there was under-reporting to the FBI...well, you can guess where I'm going in regards to accuracy...
"This does not include the answer to the question you asked, but it does address some pertinent questions surrounding the "pull out of DC"
email:
Starting with the murder (not firearm death) rate per 100,000 population for 2004, if you use the city per capita murder rate (http://www.morganquitno.com/cit04r.pdf, higher than the greater metro region, http://www.morganquitno.com/met04r.pdf) you get 35.8 murders/100K population (That's 198 murders--DC population 553,523 (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/11000.html).
In Iraq for the same time period (2004), there were 848 US fatalities
(http://icasualties.org/oif/). The "pull out of DC" email troop strength numbers of 160,000 are probably high. If we use the US ground troop numbers over the same period (2004), we get an average of
133,917 (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_orbat_es.htm). This makes the US troop murder rate (for lack of a better term) 633 per 100,000.
That's almost 20 times higher the rate of DC, and almost 10 times New Orleans' number two rate (second to Camden, NJ's number one rate of 60.8 per 100,000 (just to interject another issue to the conversation).
While these numbers are for 2004, and not "the last 22 months" they likely indicate that the "pull out of DC" emailer, in addition to being a little insensitive to the sacrifices being made in Iraq, also has a little trouble with decimal points."
At 8:32 AM,
waltzingmathilda said…
Sorry to offend. Wasn't taking it seriously in the first place. Just thought it was a vaguely amusing thought. It constantly amazes me that, in the same city our lawmakers operate out of, DC has a bad rep for the quality of schools, crime rate, and poverty. How can they think they can go to another country and "fix" it, when only a few miles away students cannot learn because they are hungry and begging their teachers for lunch money?
At 9:18 AM,
Anonymous said…
No offense taken - and quite honestly, our schools have been worse since the federal government has decided that they are going to try to fix things. What upsets me about the whole thing is that whenever trying to fix the problems the government never does anything to address the actual problem, only the symptoms...it's why we end up with travesties like "No Child Left Behind."
And, honestly having worked in comparable neighborhood schools in Philly, I was always disturbed by how many of these kids asked teachers for money to get food, but wore clothes and/or shoes that were worth well in excess of $100. My wardrobe for the entire week often didn't cost what some of these kids spent for one day of clothes. There are a whole bunch of disconnects that frustrated me - between the kids and the fact that the education they were receiving could put them in a better place; the Government not understanding that the problems in our inner city educational system started outside of the school, and nothing they did in it (outside of improving the facilities and teacher salaries to attract better teachers) was going to change anything; the culture within these depressed areas that demanded that every insult/disrespect be met with an escallation of the incident...I could go on (as you well know)...but my thing was just that something seemed off about those statistics.
And as my dad the accountant once told me, if you're good enough at math, you can make statistics say anything you want them to.
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