And if they stayed home as part of the general population the violence rates would be even higher? Your point?

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2008/01/notepads-of-sha.html

BYLINES OF BRUTALITY

As Casualties Mount, Some Question The Emotional Stability of Media Vets

An Iowahawk Special Investigative Report

With STATISTICAL GUIDANCE from the New York Times

A Denver newspaper columnist is arrested for stalking a story subject. In Cincinnati, a television reporter is arrested on charges of child molestation. A North Carolina newspaper reporter is arrested for harassing a local woman. A drunken Chicago Sun-Times columnist and editorial board member is arrested for wife beating. A Baltimore newspaper editor is arrested for threatening neighbors with a shotgun. In Florida, one TV reporter is arrested for DUI, while another is charged with carrying a gun into a high school. A Philadelphia news anchorwoman goes on a violent drunken rampage, assaulting a police officer. In England, a newspaper columnist is arrested for killing her elderly aunt.

read it all (and note the graph – LOLOL). Language caution……………

They’re essentially comparing anecdotal data with other anecdotal data. It is “systematic and repeatable” from the standpoint that they had a describable method for finding their numbers, and presumably someone else could use the same method (though apparently the Pentagon said it “could not duplicate the newspaper’s research.”) That doesn’t mean their method is any good, because their source, media reports, have too many built-in variables. Nor can they say with anything like authority that these killings were necessarily tied to vets’ service. In some cases they no doubt were, but in others they were not – a fact ignored by the Times on the way to their “89% increase”. I can’t really improve on the Wall Street Journal’s critique:

“The Times is purporting to test a media stereotype by measuring its prevalence in the media. As a Pentagon spokesman put it, that 89% spike could have resulted from “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.” Or, to put it more bluntly, the Times hasn’t necessarily proved that the stereotype is true — only that it is a stereotype.”

You can call us all hypocrites and assert that we’d all change sides if the results were different if you like, but crap data is crap data. You’ve said that the research has “flaws”. My point is merely that it is SO flawed, and so extrapolated from a small data set, that it’s too thin a shingle on which to hang a multi-part investigative report in the “newspaper of record,” especially when it tends to impugn returning service men and women.

I’m glad that your Left-leaning friends didn’t get that impression. But I don’t see how anyone can argue that the central thrust of this article is not, “vets are coming home damaged/crazy and killing people 89% more often”. If they’re going to make a charge like that they had better have some convincing evidence to show us. This Lexis/Nexis nonsense they’ve come up with wouldn’t pass muster in a high school term paper.

And yes, frankly, it is true that this whole thing wouldn’t grate so much if it didn’t feed into a popular and unfair stereotype that has done real damage to real people over the years.

There are better causes to defend than the malicious intent of the New York Times.

There’s a much more rewarding life to be had on the side of those trying to build up rather than with those trying to tear down. Yes, It’s more difficult – much, much more difficult – but it’s worth it. It really is.

This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

so if you are going to play your numbers game you should start with 349 rather than 121.
Second, you are not comparing like data sets (they were not collected in the same way) and you are not comparing like groups (one is vetted, the other is not), you also failed to correct for criminal history. In short your analysis is much poorer than that of the NYT. There is a general data set that is well recorded and there is the military subset that has not been systematically recorded. What is becoming increasingly evident is that such a data set needs to be gathered and analyzed. It should be possible, though time consuming and expensive. There public records of all felons and there are records of all those who have served. It is well outside the scope of a newspaper article to do this but maybe this will motivate some sociology dept or think tank to put out the money and effort. Then we can talk about statistical comparisons. Until then we cannot.
Again my guess (and the guesses of my Left leaning friends) is that the evidence would show an increase in violence but would still be below that of the general populace, particularly when corrected for sex and socioeconomic factors.
Keep in mind that all of us here are responding to the same article, several of us read it, all of us had the opportunity to see the raw numbers in the article, and none of us after reading the article thought that veterans were more likely than the general population to be murderers.

Mars,
The NYT evidence is actually in a grey area between anecdotal and valid systematically collected data set. They did use a repeated and systematic approach. It had flaws, but it was systematic and repeatable. I have been using anecdotal as a short hand.

The big difference in your example is that full data sets are available. If there were not a real data set on women drivers and there was a similar study with similar results, I would say that a real study should be done and likely many on both sides of this current debate would shift sides. Consistency in standards is almost completely lacking in the current partisan political atmosphere. If an article with similar methodology were to show a decrease in violent activity among vets or an increase in say charitable donations, or increased small business ownership then the right wing opinion pages would be trumpeting the results rather than condemning the article.

Re: what people walk away with after reading the article.
I have plenty of Left leaning friends and not one of them came away from the article with that impression. The only people I have interacted with that either walk away with the impression you outline or feel that the intent of the article is to walk away with that impression have been Right leaning.