Just got this email: Subject: Thought For The Day

[southernleftylady]

This is a joke that was fwd to me, don't do the math! Though it may be right!


If you consider that there have 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.


Conclusion:
We should immediately pull out of Washington, D.C.

[RPM]

1. tell that person to add the number of Iraqis who have died

or do non-Xtian brown people not count???

[markbark]

2. Lies, Damn Lies and statistics

The fallacy presented here is that the DC figure is per annum and the Iraq figure covers 22 months, almost twice as long.

The true death rate for Iraq would be a little more than 130 per 100,000 but then again, the RW spinmeisters never let truth get in the way of a good story.



--MAB

[ArkDem]

7. Fewer suicide bombers in DC.

[gratuitous]

3. Tell the person to go enlist

With recruitment down, that sort of deficient mental power is probably acceptable in the military nowadays.

[AllegroRondo]

4. Math check

I think the originator of this forgot a decimal place - I get a rate of approx 600 per 100,000 for Iraq.

on edit: my nubers

1760 dead / (160,000/100,000) = 1100

1100 / 22 (months in Iraq) = 50 / month

50 * 12 (months in year) = 600

[DS1]

5. It's only correct in that IEDs are the number one killer of our troops

and that firearm deaths are lower in D.C.

Idiot.

[anarch]

6. yeah, and it's a hostile occupation government here, too

Really, it is.

[JDPriestly]

8. Actually

this means we need to spend the money we are using to send our troops to Iraq on sending more police (and schools and health care and other things we need at home) in D.C. (and elsewhere here at home). Get the troops out of Iraq as soon as possible. The Iraqis will do just fine without us.

What have we accomplished in Iraq? We have made way for a government that is planning to impose Islamic law, deprive women of their rights and cozy up to Iran. As horrible as he was in other ways, Saddam respected women's rights and opposed the Islamic tyranny in Iran. I suspect the murder and crime rate was lower under Saddam also. (I think we killed at least as many people bringing "freedom" to the country as Saddam did to suppress it.) But I might be wrong on the numbers of people we killed versus the number Saddam killed because as far as I know, no one has accurately tracked the numbers of Iraqi dead, at least not since we started bombing and invading.

[RebelOne]

9. Why is everyone getting their panties in a bunch?

It's a joke, people. It's only a joke. Didn't the poster say not to do the math?

[JDPriestly]

10. There are jokes and then there are jokes

This one is a jibe and an ignorant one to boot. It does not deserve dissemination or attention and it does not deserve to be posted on DU.

[lectrobyte]

13. it may be a joke, but it smells like one of those jokes that has a

way of becoming fact. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Rush etc. are echoing this "joke" on their shows tomorrow...

[GOPFighter]

14. Some joke

Gun zealots and other RWers soak this stuff up as they are incapable of doing the math. This becomes gospel to them.

[lectrobyte]

11. Let's see:

Using numbers from http://icasualties.org/oif/

1771 dead, 28 months (damn it)

Assuming 160K troops, then to get deaths per 100K, I get:

63.25 deaths per month * (100K/160K) * 12 months = 474.38

[Zorra]

12. Thanks so much for sharing. We just love reading those freeper emails

over and over again here at DU.

[Toots]

15. I did not realize we were "occupying" DC

I received the same e'mail a mon th ago and sent a reply all answer that was not very nice. When do we ever start accepting Iraqis as real people whose deaths matter every bit as much as American deaths?

[anarch]

18. DC is occupied territory -- but that email is still stupid

and I wish I knew the answer as to when Americans will ever accept Iraqis, and other "non-Western" people, as humans. The racism involved is just mind-boggling. You can tell most people that 100,000+ Iraqi citizens have been killed in the invasion and occupation, and you just get a blank stare at best, or possibly even a "well, we have to make sacrifices to fight the terrorists" or some amazing bullshit like that.

[cosmik debris]

16. That is how they frame it.

And they got you doin' the math when it is their logic you should question. We have 160,000 law enforcers in Iraq. Count the civilian deaths separately. If 1700 law enforcers had been killed in D.C. in 28 months then we probably should pull out!

They set up a math straw man and distracted some from the apples and oranges that they are comparing.

[OrlandoGator]

17. So are they saying that only 70 or so troops have died in Iraq?

The math is fucked up.