Deb,
First,
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.
