Couldn't pay me to live in Washington DC......

[Madison]

Got this in an email and all I can say is !!!

If you consider that there has been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq Theater of operations during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm Death rate of 60 per 100,000. The rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000.

That means that you are 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, (which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation), than you are in Iraq.

[davidmarver]

I'm with you there...I may be for gun rights, but coming from someone who has had a gun pointed at his head , I think it's best to stay as far away from D.C. as possible...enter SoCal .

[mweir145]

It seemed pretty good when I visited it, but after looking at those stats I'm not sure what to think.

[wrveres]

I know DC is bad, but I don't think those stat's are right.

in 1998 DC's "gun death" rate was 37.46 per 100,000 and I doubt it has doubled in the last eight years.

To put 37.46 per 100,000 in to perspective though, consider that the average state is around 8 per 100,000, and DC is almost 5 times that rate.

[BaseballFann0008]

I'm with you there...I may be for gun rights, but coming from someone who has had a gun pointed at his head , I think it's best to stay as far away from D.C. as possible...enter SoCal .

i bet thats a good story

[WharfRat]

I'm with you there...I may be for gun rights, but coming from someone who has had a gun pointed at his head , I think it's best to stay as far away from D.C. as possible...enter SoCal .

That's funny. I've been in the DC area for a while now, and this has never happened. Actually, there are quite a few million around here who it's also never happened to.

But I guess it's only a matter of time before we all bite it, right?

While we're on the subject, you couldn't pay me to live in TX.

[Art Vandelay]

I've lived in DC for about a year and a half now, and I live in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. It's not too awfully bad, but you can't get pizza or Chinese food delivered to my building...so you can imagine what the neighborhood is like. Anyway, I haven't had any problems since I've lived here...but when I was living in Cali I had guns pointed at me twice.

Most tourists wont ever feel threatened coming here because the crime isnt' in the tourist areas. I would bet that 90% of the murders in DC occur in either Capital Heights or Anacostia (where I live), so if you stay in the good parts of town you'll be fine.

[dannyolbb]

Those are some pretty damning statistics.
Or rather they would be, if they were even REMOTELY accurate.

DoD puts out a ‘news release’ everytime a Coalition casualty is publically identified, including the cause of death.

in the UK (the 3rd largest force in Iraq, right behind ‘private contractors’) they track casualties at http://www.operations.mod.uk/telic/casualties.htm

other sites, like CNN compile all those releases into a long and growing list.

(i know what you’re thinking – “CNN, why those pinko leftists wouldn’t know a casualty if it bit ‘em in the ass!”)

well, how about the Army Times then?

or try http://www.icasualties.org – more specifically the ‘casualty metrics’ page, which has turned all those ‘news releases’ from DoD into a bar-graph –

http://icasualties.org/oif/Stats.aspx

there, you will see that ‘Hostile Fire’ is actually the leading cause of Coalition Casualties, with IEDs(2nd), RPGs(5th), electrocution(26th), etc. all listed separately.

------------------------

What does this mean? If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in theater during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000.

sure, that's the rate you get if you use bad data (and bad math).

let's try the same calculation(s) using REAL data from the DoD -

from 01/01/04 -12/31/04 (one year) there were 334 firearms-related casualties in Iraq.
using the same math as above, you will see that the 'firearm death rate' is actually 208.75 per 100,000
(nearly quadruple the rate claimed by the author)

-----------------------

The rate in DC is 80.6 per 100,000.

NO IT ISN'T.

the DC Dept. of Health tracks mortality data, by cause of death...
the most recent year for which data has been compiled is 2002.

http://dchealth.dc.gov/services/adminis ... t2002.shtm

there is no category for ‘firearms’, but there were 220 homicides in DC in 2002.

let's pretend that knives & baseball bats & tazers don’t exist,
and that ALL of these homicides were commited with firearms.

that gives DC a ‘firearm death rate’ of 38.5 per 100,000
(less than half of the rate claimed by the author).

-
What I don't understand is why someone would make this up and forward it in their email. It's already all over the net. It seems obvious that someone is trying to make it seem as if things aren't so bad in Iraq. That is not an argument I will get into. But I will say that it seems disrespectful to the troops to lie and claim that things aren't as bad as they really are.

(This isn't directed at Madison but at the person who made this junk up)

[JTWood]

Yeah, I got this e-mail about 6 months ago. A co-worker looked up some of the numbers, and it's the biggest piece of cherry picking I've ever seen.

Firearm deaths in Iraq? That's retarded. We all know that it's just as common to die from IED or roadside bomb in Iraq. An insurgent with a gun is out-numbered 10-to-1 by better trained forces on our side. Our soldiers don't die as often by gunfire because insurgents don't have the chance to get near enough to shoot them in the first place.

Just for fun, let's see the comparison of IED per capita deaths in D.C. versus Iraq? Where would you want to live then?

I hate it when people manipulate statistics...

[BaseballFann0008]

Those are some pretty damning statistics.
Or rather they would be, if they were even REMOTELY accurate.

DoD puts out a ‘news release’ everytime a Coalition casualty is publically identified, including the cause of death.

in the UK (the 3rd largest force in Iraq, right behind ‘private contractors’) they track casualties at http://www.operations.mod.uk/telic/casualties.htm

other sites, like CNN compile all those releases into a long and growing list.

(i know what you’re thinking – “CNN, why those pinko leftists wouldn’t know a casualty if it bit ‘em in the ass!”)

well, how about the Army Times then?

or try http://www.icasualties.org – more specifically the ‘casualty metrics’ page, which has turned all those ‘news releases’ from DoD into a bar-graph –

http://icasualties.org/oif/Stats.aspx

there, you will see that ‘Hostile Fire’ is actually the leading cause of Coalition Casualties, with IEDs(2nd), RPGs(5th), electrocution(26th), etc. all listed separately.

------------------------

What does this mean? If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in theater during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000.

sure, that's the rate you get if you use bad data (and bad math).

let's try the same calculation(s) using REAL data from the DoD -

from 01/01/04 -12/31/04 (one year) there were 334 firearms-related casualties in Iraq.
using the same math as above, you will see that the 'firearm death rate' is actually 208.75 per 100,000
(nearly quadruple the rate claimed by the author)

-----------------------

The rate in DC is 80.6 per 100,000.

NO IT ISN'T.

the DC Dept. of Health tracks mortality data, by cause of death...
the most recent year for which data has been compiled is 2002.

http://dchealth.dc.gov/services/adminis ... t2002.shtm

there is no category for ‘firearms’, but there were 220 homicides in DC in 2002.

let's pretend that knives & baseball bats & tazers don’t exist,
and that ALL of these homicides were commited with firearms.

that gives DC a ‘firearm death rate’ of 38.5 per 100,000
(less than half of the rate claimed by the author).

-
What I don't understand is why someone would make this up and forward it in their email. It's already all over the net. It seems obvious that someone is trying to make it seem as if things aren't so bad in Iraq. That is not an argument I will get into. But I will say that it seems disrespectful to the troops to lie and claim that things aren't as bad as they really are.

(This isn't directed at Madison but at the person who made this junk up)

good analysis and thanks for the truth