Jeb,
As I suspected, you just don’t get it. It is useless to argue with people who think facts don’t matter, anecdotes should be used to form news stories, and who believe that just because the NYT gives two paragraphs to let the Pentagon state their problems with their methodology (in a huge and lengthy piece) that is actually a sign of fairness and lack of bias. And by the way, I DO have the facts to back up my assessment that it would be safer to have an Iraq and Afghanistan vet move in than ordinary Joe. The NYT article says 121 “killings” over the 6 years since vets started returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. The vast majority of those vets are males between the ages of 19 and 34. To be fair, the NYT says it may have missed a few, so let’s say that they missed a lot — let’s say for fun that twice as many “killings” were actually committed by Afghan/Iraq war vets in that period, 242 killings over six years. That’s 40.3 killings per year. But how many vets are there? Well, those numbers are always changing, but Salon reported this “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″. Now these number might include repeat tours, so to be safe, let’s assume that half a million individuals have been deployed by the military to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq- a very conservative estimate. So we have the stat of 40.3 killings per year by 500,000 vets of the wars. That means we have an average of 8.06 killings per 100,000 vets. Let’s compare that to the DoJ general public statistics which can be viewed here: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/oagetab.htm
For the age group 18-24 the average varies from a low of 22.2 to a high of 42.8, so to be extra safe we’ll say 22.2. For the age group 25-34 it varies from a low of 10.9 to a high of 22.6, again to be extra conservative, we’ll go with 10.9. Looking at the two numbers 22.2 and 10.9 we could say that 15 would be a very conservative average for the entire age group from 18-34 which is the age group that these war vets would come from. Already that 8.06 rate looks a lot better than the 15 rate for the general population — but that is not even correcting for the gender difference. The general population numbers include women in their stats. Women are approximately 50% of the general population, but they commit far, far less murders. So if we looked at that murder average compared just to the male population it would be significantly higher. (At least 1/3 again, about 20 (though likely in reality more like 2x as much)) And since the majority of Iraq/Afghan war vets are men (again by around a 10:1 margin) that is the more appropriate group to compare. You can crunch the numbers, but any way you look at it, by the NYT own stats, putting in a ton of correction for potential murders missed, low averages, etc, it is absolutely clear that a male member of the populace in that age group is far more likely than a war vet to commit murder. This is hit piece, and the fact that liberal blogs aren’t picking up on it is utterly and completely inconsequential. This has nothing to do with partisanship or politics on my part, it has to do with truth, and the NYT’s inability to get past its own partisanship to face that truth. I had no problem with the Washington Post’s expose on the problems at Walter Reed — because it was based on verifiable facts, not anecdotes pieced together in the hope of creating a story like the NYT has done here.
