A friend of mine who served in Iraq sent this along:
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.
Yeah, this has been circulating around the internet since 2005.
The firearm death rate in Washington DC is around 31 per 100K.
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-per-100-000
As of December 2006, around 2400 U.S. soldiers have been kiilled by hostile fire of all kinds: [I excluded non-hostile fatalities]
http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index20061221.pdf
So that would be 2400 soldiers over 46 months, or around 52 deaths per month, or 612 per year. The 160,000 figure is certainly too high; perhaps it includes all soldiers in the Middle East? A closer figure for Iraq would be around 135,000. That would give us a death rate around 460 per 100K, or almost 15 times higher than the Washington DC firearm death rate. Of course, the firearm death rate in Washington is three times higher than that national average, so it’s an unusual state to compare with.
Conclusion: the right wing should get out of statistics.
To# 1,
Please do not forget the mental attrition rate of the service personnel and the wounded plus not being where you would like to be living. Then there is just the plain horror of it all everyday and everynight, your future plans are to kill or be killed; not much of a life.
J R Dittbrenner
Well, looks like it’s an urban legend.
The statistical data on deaths (attributed to criminal acts I assume) in Washington probably include all persons that died in and around the district limits, regardless of nationality, race, occupation. The figure, although questionable, in regards to solders in Iraq only include our solders. If you are going to make such comparisons you should put it in the context of “apples to apples”.
How many police officers, and or security detail personnel die in Washington D.C.? — compared to our solders.
How many people, both US solders, US civilians and Iraqis have lost their lives due to sectarian (gang) violence? — compared to the number of people killed in Washington D.C.
If you had to choose between Washington D.C. and Iraq, where would you go?
Urban legend or not, the calculation is interesting. According to the Brookings report, from May 03 through December 06 there were 22,401 American wounded. By my calculation, this works out to around 4,230 wounded per 100,000 annually. Adding in the fatalities, we would get an overall casualty rate of around 4700 per 100,000.
Washington D.C. has something like 550,000 people. Applying the Iraq war casualty rate to Washington D.C., we would end up with around 26,000 violently killed or wounded in DC every year, or 71 people per day.
Gotta love statistics…they will say whatever the spinner of the data wants them to say.
The key word in the initial data is the word FIREARM death rate not the OVERALL death rate.
So the conclusion of “you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the US Capital than you are in Iraq” is accurate, as most soldier deaths are from IEDs and not small arms fire.
Also the data set utilized as the base population in the initial analysis is the TROOP population, not the population in Iraq. The actual death rate amongst soliders over the last four years has been extremely low, given the number of soldiers in country. In fact, I am amazed at the fixation we have over 750 deaths a year, IN A COMBAT ZONE, given 3,000 Americans civilians died in a single day, while conducting their normal “safe” activity of working on US soil. The death rate among the civilian populace however, has been very high, especially in Baghdad, this is not at the hands of US soldiers, but other Iraqis.
In the end, I do agree, we should pull out of Washington D.C.!!!
As long we’re on statistics…
According to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in 2005, 16,885 people were killed in alcohol-related crashes – an average of one almost every half-hour. These deaths constituted approximately 39 percent of the 43,443 total traffic fatalities.
This is a slight decrease from 2004, when 16,919 people were killed in alcohol-related traffic crashes, representing 39 percent of the 42,836 people killed in all traffic crashes.
http://madd.org/stats/1112