Just got this in my inbox:
Thoughts?
Have the Washington police killed hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians?
To point out only the two most obvious flaws:
-
2,112 deaths were not from firearms.
-
The firearms death rate for DC is everyone, not just police being shot. The similar death rate in Iraq would no doubt be much, much higher.
So, not only is the e-mail silly, it’s also stupid.
That’s an old email from back when the press wasn’t telling us “the real story of our progress in Iraq.” The US death toll today stands at 2865, plus 246 coalition member deaths. The sender of that email really needs to update it to reflect the current dire situation over there.
Evidently not.
He he he he.
I wonder how accurate that 80.6 per 100,000 statistic is too.
As others have pointed out, this is comparing apples and oranges. To get a true sense of how out-of-control Iraq is compared to an American city you should compare total deaths on both sides. Or compare soldiers deaths to cop deaths.
But, really, the case for pulling out is NOT based on the number of casualties we’re taking. If we were succeeding then those sacrifices would be worth it. The case for pulling out is based on the fact that our continued presence isn’t accomplishing anything. Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is spiraling out of control, the police and the Iraqi army are hopelessly compromised, the power of the militias is growing, relgious extremism is on the rise, and there’s no clear strategy that we can pursue that will make ANY of this ANY better. The war is lost. All we’re quibbling about now is how many more American soldiers will be asked to die before we come to grips with that reality.
Um - the death rate given for Iraq is the monthly rate. The one for DC is the yearly rate. I can’t find anything that is exactly 80 but this source is reasonably close to that. You might want to tell the sender of that mail that the source is either lying or innumerate.
I dont think there’s any debate as to how stupid the idea of the email is. I guess I put it here because people in Great Debates are pretty quick with statistics and such. I was kinda more curious about the “facts” given than about the idea or conclusion–those both being ridiculous.
This is bullshit. There are not 80.6 firearms death per 100,000 citizens per month in DC. Even at its worst DC never got close to that rate. Also, the Iraq statistics were for U.S. soldiers, and the DC “statistics” were for the total population. to compare you’d either have to limit the D.C. statistics to law enforcement killed, or increase the Iraq statistics to include Iraqi civilian deaths.
I try to believe there are Bush supporters with functioning cerebrums, but it gets harder and harder with each of these BS emails.
I know these points were made upthread but I had to vent.
Apart from the mistakes already mentioned, this stupid propaganda doesn’t compare like with like.
-
there have hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq, massively higher than civilian deaths in Washington
-
there have been over 2,000 soldiers killed in Iraq, compared to none in Washington
Pull out and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
There was a similar statistic put out during the Spanish-American War that showed that the death rate for soldiers in Cuba were lower than the death rate in NYC or some such thing. I couldn’t find a cite. Anyone?
First of all, as lots of people have pointed out, we’re comparing apples and oranges: the murder rate for Americans in DC, not compared with Iraqis in Iraq or Baghdadis in Baghdad, but with the death rate for well-armed American soldiers in Iraq.
But WTF - let’s do the comparison.
According to the Washington Times, there have been 1.126 murders in DC in the 2001-05 period, or an average of 225 a year.
D.C. has a population of about 550,000, so that’s roughly one murder for every 2,440 D.C. residents per year.
The population of Americans in Iraq has varied over the past three years and eight months, but has averaged about 140,000, and the death toll stands at 2,865, or 781 per year, or one death for every 179 soldiers each year.
So life is about 14 times as dangerous for U.S. soldiers in Iraq as it is for D.C. residents in D.C.
And you have no idea how hard it is to kill .126 of a person.
Needless to say, that shoulda been 1**,**126.
Thank you! That was exactly the kind of shit I was looking for. I couldn’t just hit REPLY TO ALL and say “This is teh stupid”. I wanted to be able to articulate why.
Happy to help with the number-crunching - it’s what I’m good at. 
It’s also worth mentioning in your response that this disparity in death rates isn’t happening under equal conditions. Even in D.C.'s worst neighborhoods, people drive around in regular automobiles and don’t normally wear body armor. Our soldiers in Iraq are dying at 14 times the rate of Americans in D.C., despite the fact that our soldiers are wearing body armor, driving around in armor-plated vehicles, carrying lots of heavy weaponry, and almost always driving in convoys for safety’s sake.
If our soldiers in Iraq were wearing, driving, carrying more or less what D.C. residents wear, drive, and carry, one would expect their casualty rates to be many times as high. They’re equipped as they are because Iraq’s probably well over 100 times as dangerous as D.C., but our soldiers’ added defenses and weaponry keep the death multiple down to ‘only’ 14.
Gives one a new perspective on just how thankless a task it must be to serve in Iraq.
This is exactly the same kind of garbage that Brit Hume spewed a few years ago on Faux Nuze. Bakersfield (CA) is more dangerous than Baghdad, according to Hume.
When he got busted for that bit of ignorant “reporting”, his response was something like “Well sure, but it’s illustrative of something”. Implying that if we the viewers couldn’t see his pearls of wisdom, that was our problem.
As a Washingtonian living in Baghdad, I just have to chime in with how absurd this email is. This morning while I was getting ready for work and drinking coffee (about an hour’s time), I heard 3 explosions. That is pretty typical here and it’s just the explosions that were within earshot of my apartment.
As others have noted, the email only comments on the American casaulties. About once a month, I lose an Iraqi colleague to the violence of Baghdad’s streets. They have been beheaded, shot, and tortured with powerdrills.
I assure you that when I am home in DC, I do not hear explosions so frequently that they are not remarked upon. I do not know anyone who has been beheaded. We do not find on average 100 corpese in the Potomac river every day (as they do in the Tigris) If these things were commonplace in DC, you would have heard about them.
Plus it only counts American deaths. American casualty rates are way higher, and likely also not comparable to DC.