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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (26604)	3/11/2008 10:49:12 AM
From: Geoff Altman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

This doesn't quite relate but when Norfolk Va. started complaining to the Navy about unruly sailors in their town.... Norfolk residents had signs out like "dogs and sailors, keep of the grass" etc. They were also claiming that since the military had the Exchange and Commissary sailors were spending almost all of their money on base. So in order to make a point the Navy paid a good portion of sailors with 2 dollar bills...... To say the least, Norfolk was flooded with 2 dollar bills and the towns people shut their gob holes.....

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (26604)	3/11/2008 7:14:16 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 71588

I think the stat for firearm death rate for DC might be too high. This site shows it as 31.2 statemaster.com But then again that's per year, and your stat was for 22 months, or almost twice as long. 31.2/1222 = 57.2 or close to that of Iraq. Also the death rate for US soldiers in Iraq is much higher than the firearm death rate. Many of the deaths are from IEDs or accidents. Some are from weapons other than firearms (is an RPG a "firearm", not by most people's definition) So, I'll start fresh and look for my own data. US combat/hostile KIA in Iraq is 3486 icasualties.org The total US military deaths by IEDs in Iraq is 1723 icasualties.org 3486-1723=1763. Not all of those 1763 deaths would be firearm deaths, but I don't have a detailed breakdown of reasons for deaths, and I assume most of the non-IED deaths would be from firearms so lets say 1700. That's over 60 months (-9 days but its not like the rest of this is so precise that 9 days over 5 years throws off the precision). 1700/60 = 28.3/month. Since we want an annual rate 1700/5 is 340. But we want a rate per hundred thousand. What's the average number of soldiers in Iraq over the last 5 years? Maybe 125K? 340(100,000/125,000) is 272. The DC rate is supposed to be 31.2 according to sitemaster, or 80.6 according to your data, either way its much lower. (Although the worst neighborhoods in DC would likely have a higher rate than Iraq) Maybe more than 63 hostile deaths where from things other than firearms or IEDs, so you probably could cut the Iraq rate a bit. Maybe its more like 230. Still a lot worse than DC. But that included the initial invasion, and the assault on Fellujah, and the generally higher death toll in 2006 and early 2007. Lets look only since the beginning of October (5 1/3 months) to see what the current situation is, rather than the situation for the whole war. 144 hostile KIA. 97 from IEDs. 47 from other. 47 deaths/5.33 months is 8.8/month. Multiply that by 12 (to get an annualized rate and you get about 105. 105 total out of 160K men and women gives you around 65. Now that's the total hostile non IED deaths. It would include deaths from knives, from RPGs, from suicide bombers, from any helicopters that might have been shot down (don't know that that's happened recently but it has in the past) not just firearm death rates. DC's rate is still lower, but its much closer than before. Its possible if a lower proportion of the Iraqi non-IED hostile death rates are from things other than firearms than I thought, that the rate in Iraq might be comparable to the rate in DC. What might be more important is the murder rate in DC compared to the total hostile death rate in Iraq. Hostile deaths in Iraq since the beginning of October are as stated above 144. 144/5.33= about 27 per month. Annualized it would be 324. Per 100K that would be around 200. The homicide rate in DC is only a bit more than 1/6th of that. At its peak it might have been a bit less than 1/2 the hostile death rate in Iraq. I looked up so local stats for the worst police districts in DC, but they still have a lower homicide rate. But I those worse districts (there are 7 police districts in DC) may have had a worse rate back when DC was at its murder peak. I'd look up that information and post it but my source for the recent murder rates for DC police districts doesn't go back far enough on a per district basis (source is mpdc.dc.gov ) Maybe they changed the districts back in the 90s, I don't know.