Baghdad safer than Chicago for troops?

[DonP]

Am I missing something here?

Don't get me wrong, every death is a crucial loss to our o????ry and my kid is over there now so it matters a whole lot to me personally. But ...

Chicago has around 650 plus murders every year. (We're gun free so they must all be by knife or club). At the current rate of attacks, Baghdad, counting the open hostilities will come in under the Chicago murder rate the way things are going. And that's just one city. Throw in Wash DC and you are way over the war death rate.

So why are the general media people ranting about the "terrible death rate" and overlooking the deaths right here in our back yards? Is the death of a child in a gang cross fire somehow less important than the death of a trooper on guard duty to the news media?

It just seems like a double standard aimed at skewering Bush and the administration while they clamor for military involvement in Liberia.

Don P.

 

[Poodleshooter]

It's the same as the "drowning in pools" phenomenon.
Pools "kill" more pre-teen children than guns do. You never hear about this because people like swimming pools and find them a necessary recreational tool. If more people felt that way about guns, we wouldn't have so many gun bans.

 

[willyjixx]

its easier to blame....

this wouldnt have happened if we werent at war!

gang violence cant be prevented so we have to deal with it.

isnt the media liberals?

 

[cuchulainn]

650 is not a rate. To figure out if Chicago is more dangerous than Iraq, you'd need to compare the rate of violent death in Chicago to the rate of violent death to US troops in Iraq. You can't compare the raw number of deaths between different sized populations.

Godspeed to your kid.

 

[Art Eatman]

Hazards of the Military

Somewhere in the 1970s I read that the death rate per 100,000 for traffic accidents during the period 1966-1971, for the age group of 18-25, was greater than the death rate for our soldiers of that age group in Vietnam.

More troops/pilots died during Desert Shield than during Desert Storm.

It would be interesting to compare the rate of deaths and injuries for military personnel during periods of non-combat vs. combat. I dunno where to look. I imagine the non-combat numbers might startle some folks.

Art

 

[foghornl]

Baghdad probably is safer than Chikago. Too many Cook County voters don't realize that Emperor "DICK" Daley II is a bigger tyrant than the enite Hussein family.

 

[Sergeant Bob]

In 2002, there were 1007 deaths in the military (all branches, including Guard and Reserve totalling 1,564,066) with 1.1 per 100,000 attributable hostile action.
Information from
here

 

[bjengs]

I'm laughing because the board software auto-censored your "country" because you transposed the "o" and the "c" and it picked up a dirty word for female genitalia.