NYT Gets Checked - Again

Via Insty comes this posting over at Winds of Change:

Today, the NY Times has the first part of a special series - War Torn:Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles. It appears that the troops are coming home and becoming murderers.

Of course, being the pajama-clad, non-editor-screened person he is, Armed Liberal looks beyond the hype and discovers (emphasis original):

From the October 1, 2001 start of the Afghanistan war, that's about 26,000 troops/month. To date (Jan 2008) that would give about 1.99 million.

That means that the NY Times 121 murders represent about a 7.08/100,000 rate.

[SNIP]

Now, how does that compare with the population as a whole?

Turning to the DoJ statistics, we see that the US offender rate for homicide in the 18 - 24 yo range is 26.5/100,000.For 25 - 34, it's 13.5/100,000.

As they say, read the whole thing.

UPDATE: More here :

So, basically, the reporters went trolling on Lexis-Nexis and other databases to find "murder" within the same paragraph as "veteran" or "soldier," and built a front-page story around that research.

Good old search engine research. Who edited that piece, anyway?

Ya know, back in the '70's every cop show on TV (Mannix, Longstreet, Cannon, Ironside, Hawaii Five-0, etc.) had at least one episode where the Vietnam Vet flipped out and started causing trouble. The crazy vet was the villain of choice back then.

Looks like they're starting up all over again.

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