If you had bothered to read the article, the particular study that I cited only looked at males.....military and non military. No females.
The article says -
"Male U.S. veterans are twice as likely to die by suicide than people with no military service", perhaps it meant "than men with no military service", but I can't be blamed for its lack of precision.
There is more at the article itself, but you failed to quote the important statement - "Those with military service committed suicide at a rate 2.13 times higher than the other men, but did not have a higher risk of dying from disease, accidental causes or murder, the study found."
But that statement is itself questionble. For one thing the actual study apparently quotes a slightly different ratio. Not enough to be a signficant difference in this debate, and in fact the different ratio is higher, but it shows sloppiness in at least the news report and possibly the study itself.
Also you answer only one point out of all the problems raised in response to your post
siliconinvestor.com
Since apparently you don't want to read the whole posts, I'll pull out the key points. First about the murder rate (which doesn't respond to the suicide issue, but is relevant to the original question about media distortion, then on to suicide
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A very conservative estimate of how many different service members have passed through Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait since 2003 is 350,000 (and no, that's not double-counting those with repeated tours of duty).
Now consider the Justice Department's numbers for murders committed by all Americans aged 18 to 34 - the key group for our men and women in uniform. To match the homicide rate of their peers, our troops would've had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007.
In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent.
nypost.com
Since 9/11, about 1.6 million troops have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. That makes the homicide rate among veterans of these wars 7.6 per 100,000 -- or about one-third the homicide rate for their age group (18 to 35) in the general population of both sexes.
But fewer than 200,000 of the 1.6 million troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been women, and the murder rate for the general population includes both males and females. Inasmuch as males commit nearly 90 percent of all murders, the rate for males in those age groups is probably nearly double the male/female combined rates, which translates to about 30 to 55 murderers per 100,000 males aged 18 to 35.
So comparing the veterans' rate of murder to only their male counterparts in the general population, we see that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are about 10 times less likely to commit a murder than non-veterans of those wars.
theodoresworld.net
Yet here's something odd about the data: For the overall rates to correspond to the male and female rates, the veteran pool would have to be 62% to 64% female, and the nonveteran pool would have to be about 66% female. Check it out, for instance, with the lower bounds on the 2005 data: 11.1 x 0.63 (female) + 31.5 x 0.37 (male) = a bit under 18.7 (overall).
Or, if you prefer, consider a veteran pool of 23 million people. You'd need:
* 14.5 million (23 million x 0.63) women, or 145 hundred-thousands, with 1610 suicides (145 x 11.1) and
* 8.5 million (23 million x .037) men, or 85 hundred-thousands, with 2680 suicides (85 x 31.5) to get
* a total of 4290 suicides (a bit under 18.7 per 100,000) for the whole 23 million.
That can't be right. The VA reports that the veteran pool is only 7% female, which means that if the CBS News overall veteran and female veteran numbers are right, then the male veteran numbers would be 19.27 to 21.4 in 2005 and 18.06 to 22.5 in 2004, not far from the male suicide rate of about 17.7 per year (see WISQARS). Of course, we can't tell which of the CBS numbers are right — but it does seem like they can't all be right. Plus of course you can't have a population that's about 51% female but at the same time 62-64% female among veterans and 66% female among nonveterans.
volokh.com |
