I got this e-mail today:
I know this has been debunked before, but I’ve searched and can’t find it. I also couldn’t find it on snopes. I know it’s sort of a joke, but I don’t want my mom, who sent me this, to believe this crap. Thanks.
it’s been rehashed here: Google Answers: Firearm Death Rate in Washington, D.C.
But even if the numbers are correct, it’s ridiculous to compare the survival rate of trained and equipped troops to random civilians, and it’s ridiculous to compare military deaths to “firearm deaths” that are more than half suicides.
AFAICT, it’s just plain wrong. If there are 2867 deaths among American servicepeople in Iraq in the course of 22 months, that’s an average of about 130 deaths per month. 130 deaths per month among 160,000 soldiers is equivalent to about 81 deaths per month among 100,000 soldiers.
So even if the DC firearms-homicide rate really were as high as 80 deaths per month per 100,000 residents, that wouldn’t beat the death rate among American soldiers in Iraq. But this Wiki article says that DC homicide rates peaked in 1991 at 81 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants over the course of the whole year.
That means that according to the glurge’s own figures, the average monthly death rate among soldiers in Iraq is about twelve times as high as the DC homicide rate at its highest point.
Tell your mom that the glurge is trying to pass off a monthly rate as equivalent to a yearly rate. If she isn’t getting it, offer to lend her some money at a really low annual rate of interest, and when she agrees tell her that you actually meant a monthly rate, and she will probably spot what’s wrong. 
[In preview: Nametag’s link gives a more detailed treatment, but it seems to be fundamentally the same as what I said.]
I’m confused. 2,867/160,000 = 1791.875/100,000. It gives a monthly death rate of 81.4 (1791/22). Don’t know where 60 came from.
To what period does the second statistic refer to? The entire 22 months? Or one month?
Statistics aside, the basic premise of the comparison is false and misleading. The American military death rate is not the only reason we should pull out of Iraq, it’s not even the primary reason.
The e-mail states that all the US soldiers in Iraq have been shot and killed.
I hope I don’t offend anyone, but haven’t roadside bombs been a major cause of death?
The same stupidity could also use home and childbirth deaths to show people should be homeless and childless.
There are two additional layers of wrongness piled on top of the statistical fuzziness the author attempts to slide past the reader.
First, it’s not quite right to compare the fatalities in the entire population of the city of Washington D.C. to only the U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq. The U.S. soldiers in Iraq would be more comparable to the Washington D.C. police force (you could also add in the Iraq police force, militias, and other coalition forces to get a complete picture).
Now, I’m pretty confident that if any major U.S. city lost over 3,000 police officers or a similar per capita rate to violent crime in a four year period they really would “pull out” and probably send in the national guard. It would be interesting, and maybe another thread, to find the U.S. city what the highest fatalities suffered by its police force.
The second point of wrongness is that it totally ignores the civilian deaths. One could debate over whether one puts more stock in the Iraqi Body Count Project or the Lancet Survey – the IBCP admits it is a conservative estimate, but regardless, either way we’re looking at many months with several thousand civilians being violently killed and thousands of civilians being internally relocated. Imagine if that happened in an American city (either compared through Baghdad or on a per capita basis).