Posted on 01/15/2008 11:58:18 PM PST by jdm
Today, the NY Times has the first part of a special series - War Torn:Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles. It appears that the troops are coming home and becoming murderers.
Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: "Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife." Pierre, S.D.: "Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress." Colorado Springs: "Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring."
Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.
The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment - along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems - appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.
And we're presented with a litany of tragedy.
But as usual, I keep asking the simple question - well, what does it mean? How do these 121 murderers compare with the base rate of murderers in the population?
And the answer appears to be damn well.
The only reference I could find for the number of troops who have served in combat areas was at GlobalSecurity.com, citing a Salon article:
Three and a half years have passed since U.S. bombs started falling in Afghanistan, and ever since then, the U.S. military has been engaged in combat overseas. What most Americans are probably unaware of, however, is just how many American soldiers have been deployed. Well over 1 million U.S. troops have fought in the wars since Sept. 11, 2001, according to Pentagon data released to Salon. As of Jan. 31, 2005, the exact figure was 1,048,884, approximately one-third the number of troops ever stationed in or around Vietnam during 15 years of that conflict.
From the October 1, 2001 start of the Afghanistan war, that's about 26,000 troops/month. To date (Jan 2008) that would give about 1.99 million.
That means that the NY Times 121 murders represent about a 7.08/100,000 rate.
Now the numbers on deployed troops are probably high - fewer troops from 2001 - 2003; I'd love a better number if someone has it.
But for initial purposes, let's call the rate 10/100,000, about 40% higher than the calculated one.
Now, how does that compare with the population as a whole?
Turning to the DoJ statistics, we see that the US offender rate for homicide in the 18 - 24 yo range is 26.5/100,000.For 25 - 34, it's 13.5/100,000.
See the problem?
Damn, is it that hard for reporters and their editors to provide a little bit of context so we can make sense of the anecdotes? It's not in Part 1 of the article. And I'll bet it won't be in the future articles, either.
Because it's not part of the narrative of how our soldiers are either depraved or damaged.
The NY Times Public Editor can be reached at public@nytimes.com.
The New York Times reports that many men are coming home from the war and becoming murderers.
Crab-grass blogger Armed Liberal reports that many more men don’t go to war and still become murderers.
Indeed, those who don’t go to war appear to become murderers at a slightly higher rate than those who do.
The New York Times didn’t mention that part.
More vindication for Helen Thomas!
P.S. A.L.’s commenters point out that his statistics don’t necessarily compare apples to apples due to the lack of available data. So the conclusion that those who go to war are less likely to commit murder is debatable, although likely. The point is that A.L. at least tried to provide some context. The NYT piece doesn’t bother.
the msm attempts to gasp at one last fresh breath of air before the last shovel of dirt is thrown onto its rotting corpse. r.i.p. msm!
Quit confusing us with the facts!
Good night.
If, just for the sake of argument, the NYT has a point then consider this...
What would the numbers be like if the NYT and the other Leftist Media had been successful in their tireless efforts to create a loss in Iraq through their negative propaganda so they could make political gains for their Democrat Party?
I think the numbers would be worse, much worse.
So the next time (tomorrow) the NYT craps on our boys, throw that in their treasonous faces.
All it took was one man to do a bit of research to destroy the NYT article.
Ralph Peters gets his stats right: the New York Times purposely misleads
January 15th, 2008
I’m a veteran and haven’t killed anybody in years. But if you read the New York Times you’d be right to worry that I might.
The Sunday, 13 January 2008, edition of the Times spent four pages! detailing that, in the four and three-quarter years since the Iraq war began, returning soldiers, sailors, and airmen came home horribly scared—mentally, of course—and committed 121 murders. Which is a big number, no question; and probably some, or even most, of the people killed didn’t even have it coming to them.
Military writer Ralph Peters, in today’s column for the New York Post, shows that about 350,000 soldiers have come back from both the Iraqi and Afghanistani wars. That makes the per-year murder rate equal to about 7.3 per 100,000.
snip
It was at this point that Peters did what any good statistician would have done: he refused to look at the statistic in isolation. He asked: is 7.3 a lot, or is it a little? How can you find out? It’s easy: by going to the Bureau of Justice web site and looking at the murder rates per 100,000 in a demographic most similar to that of GIs, which are 18-24 year-olds:
The civilian murder rate is 26.5 per 100,000
which is more than 3.5 times higher than for GIs! Incidentally, the murder rate for 14-17 year-olds is 9.3; and for those 25-34 it is 13.5, both higher rates than for GIs. It isn’t until you reach the the 35-49 year-olds do you find a lower rate at 5.1 per 100,000. As Peters says the Times
unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder.
But his best work comes when he notes
In 2005 alone, 8,718 young Americans from the same age group [as GIs] were murdered in this country. That’s well over twice as many as the number of troops killed in all our foreign missions since 2001. Maybe military service not only prevents you from committing crimes, but also keeps you alive?
Peters has called on the Time’s “public editor” Clark Hoyt (who is in charge of correcting errors) to acknowledge the paper’s purposeful character assassination of our veterans. Add your voice to Peters’s: Hoyt’s email is public@nytimes.com.
bump
I love you people. You brighten my day with your common sense perspective.
May liberalism die a painful, humiliating death.
And God bless our military. They’re a great new crop of citizens.
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