Saturday, April 7, 2007

Statistically....

My friend Rebecca in Scotland just sent me this:

INTERESTING STATISTIC...

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, here's a sobering statistic:

There has been a monthly average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2,112 deaths. That gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers.

The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000 persons for the same period.

That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the U.S. capitol than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: The U.S. should pull out of Washington

3 comments:

Rob said...

Ok, this is a cute joke, but it's bogus. The figure of 60 deaths per 100,000 soldiers is per month, not for the whole 22-month period:

100,000 / 160,000 = 0.625

0.625 x 2112 = 1320 (the actual number of deaths per 100,000 soldiers over the 22-month period, assuming these numbers are accurate)

1320 / 22 = 60

The total number of homicides in DC in 2006 was 169. (The MPD website doesn't seperate out the firearm-related homicides.) So with a population of 550,521, we get 30.69 homicides per 100,000 people for the whole year, or 2.56 per 100,000 people per month. The number of firearm-related homicides is of course less than that.

T said...

Yeah...I was actually going to post an addendum saying that the logic of the whole thing was bizarre anyway--that it implies that the US would get out of DC and stay in Iraq? What for? --but then I got distracted, so that's that.

Point well taken, anyway.

Anonymous said...

Do roadside bombs count as "firearms?"