Yesterday, The New York Times ran the first article in a series called “War Torn”, what it describes as “a series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” The article tells the story of several young male soldiers who have returned from the Middle East to difficulty adjusting to civilian life that eventually leads to murder. The premise behind the article is that the stress of America’s war on terror causes extremely violent behavior in the young soldiers who return from the fighting.
The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment - along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems - appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.
In their eagerness to portray the harmful effects of the war, the Times neglected to compare the murder rate for veterans with the national averages.
From my own analysis, it is evident that the veteran murder rate is far lower than the national average.
A conservative estimate for the number of veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan is 700,000, according to Fox News.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2005, the homicide offending rate for white males, age 18-24, is 22.4 per 100,000. Using that same rate for 700,000 veterans, the number would be 156.8 murders, far higher than the 121 cases the article cited.
Many soldiers are minorities, whose murders rates are much higher than the white average. For black males 18-24, the rate is 203 murders per 100,000 people (that’s 1421 for 700,000, just to give an idea of the comparison).
There are many veterans who are female or over the age of 24, but the high percentage of young males, especially underprivileged and minorities, makes the expected homicide rate for veterans far higher than 121 per 700,000. The numbers suggest that while in some cases the trauma of war causes violence in veterans, the overall trend is that the structure, education, and discipline provided by the United States military (or, alternatively, the maturity and perspective gained by participation in war) reduces the likelihood of a veteran committing murder.
But don’t expect the New York Times to report that.
I think the New York Times series cast a spotlight on an issue that few want to talk about. The “usual suspects” will accuse the “liberal media” of bashing a “red-blooded American institution” like the military. A growing number of people, I suspect, will see the argument of the “usual suspects” as a way to bully people into not saying anything critical about the institutions that they believe make up core American values.
I have two problems, sir, with your analysis.
The first is philosophical. Nearly all of our Founding Fathers ensured the USA was a country where dissent from the standard way of thinking would be tolerated and constitutionally protected. Bully techniques, in my view, demonstrate a lack of appreciation and sensitivity to this tradition of dissent.
In other words, it is possible to vigorously question your government and perhaps even dissent and remain patriotic. The most cogent example of that would be the founders of this country, who defied the government in England because it — the crown — had corrupted its own form of government.
This philosophy is also at the core of the arguments that led to democratic reform in Latin America, a just government in India (Gandhi’s campaign), and a lessening of overt racism in this country (Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.)
The second is that your attempt at statistical analysis is vague.
When you speak of the “murder rate” do you mean the people who were killed or the people accused of doing the killing? The New York Times story speaks only about those who are accused of killing.
Your racial observations also are vague. When you say “many soldiers are minorities,” how “many” is “many?” My information is that minorities are overrepresented in the military relative to their percentage of the general population — minorities are about 1 in 3 of U.S. residents, assuming you do not count the people who are not counted (undocumented immigrants) as minorities. Put simply, the majority of members of our military are white, not minority.
Regarding the race issue, I’d counsel you to take a closer look at the examples cited by The New York Times. A fair reading of the racial composition is that the majority of soldiers accused of killing people upon their return are white.
Popular culture associates the act of homicide among young men with minority young men. This is a loose analysis that cannot be applied, unthinkingly, to every situation.
Since you brought up the issue of homicide, the face of homicide in the U.S. is overwhelming white and male. The majority of people killed by others in this country are the spouses, girlfriends and family members of the offender. While senseless murder is indeed rampant in minority communities across the country, these senseless murders do not add up to a majority of homicides in this country.
The mistake far too many people make there is to judge the racial aspect of crime based on what they see in media reports. In short, when people hear a report of a murder, they believe they “always” or “almost always” see a black face as a suspect or say the crime occurred in a black neighborhood. This is true only in urban areas of the country, and urban areas do not predominate this country. There are no or few black faces, on the news in New Hampshire, but people are indeed murdered in that state.
The research about the news business is clear: Television news tends to cover only the sensational and the public crimes in a community. This distorts of view of reality. Pay close attention to your local news for a month. You will see a procession of black and Hispanic faces and people being arrested for felonies. Write down the number of cases you see on television for a month. Then use the public records law to ask the police department in your area for every felony incident report in that community for the same month-long time period. You will see that most crime is not committed by minorities unless the police jurisdiction is in a majority-minority city. But if the city is majority white, most crime will be committed by whites.
Comment by Mike McQueen — January 15, 2008 @ 11:31 am
Wow! This response is all over the map. The only part that actually addresses the issue is the accusation that Richard’s statistics are vague. There’s nothing vague about them. According to the Times, there have been 121 cases of veterans either killing or being charged with killing out of 750,000 veterans who have served. The average homicide rate for white males 18-24 is 22.4 per 100,000 and therefore 156 per 700,000, meaning that the rate of murder for vets (or charged with such) is lower than the national average.
The rest of the statistics Richard afforded only sought to show that if other factors were included, the rate for veterans was MUCH lower. All this has been conflated into some weird allegations of racism that has no merit.
I’m only surprised the Trilateral Commission and men from Mars didn’t make it into this rambling masterpiece of Paranoia. A true fisking would be fascinating to read, Richard, if you had the time to address such nonsense.
If were to do so I’d point out that the writer’s first four paragraphs protest the fact that your post exists at all. The writer characterizes your criticism of a newspaper article with “bullying” while at the same time claiming to believe in the freedom to dissent with “institutions that… make up core American values” Apparently the military is not one of those to the writer but the press is. I think both are and if the military can (and should be) watched closely and criticized when necessary, the press can and should be too. I wonder how the criticism of a news article can be bullying. Does Mr. Landau really have such power to bully the NYT? Has Mr. Landau sued the Times for the article? Why has not Mr. Landau the freedom to exercise the founding fathers’ right to express himself according to the first amendment?
The question isn’t whether the Times has the right to “cast a spotlight on an issue that few want to talk about” as the author contends but whether the Times is behaving in a journalistically ethical way by double-checking its facts and reporting the truth. The newspapers have every right to publish fact: they do not have a right to mislead the public by publishing propaganda where facts are discarded if they get in the way of a theory their editorial boards consider to be truth. That is a perversion of their journalistic responsibility and right akin to the taking of bribes by a judge or a president.
I only have time for one more. In the later part of this very long epistle the author writes:
How does the author know what people “believe… when people hear a report of a murder,…”???? All he can know is what HE believes. Or does he think he’s omniscient?
Comment by Abu Nudnik — January 15, 2008 @ 2:38 pm
Oops, the author was lazar, not Richard Landes. Please excuse the misattribution above.
Comment by Abu Nudnik — January 15, 2008 @ 2:40 pm
i was taken to task that I once criticized lack of succinctness here, but I stand behind that argument: there must be some tight relationship between the points you wanna make and the amount of text you make them with.
just one look at ramblings like this makes it clear there’s no point in even reading it.
fp
http://fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/
Comment by fp — January 15, 2008 @ 8:29 pm
The New York Times says it found 121 cases of violent death in the US associated with returned Iraq or Afghan war veterans. The NYT says “In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment…appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.” How many is “many?”
25 of the cases were drunk driving or reckless/suicidal driving “homicides”. The NYT did not even attempt a cursory comparison of homicide/fatal driving accident rates of civilian males in this age category with rates of service members.
The New York Times is known for its sloppy reporting. This article focuses on two Iraq war veterans who were charged with murder. One veteran killed a gang member in an alley after being first fired upon by two armed gang members. The other veteran was accosted by young men who called him “a paid killer”, setting off a confrontation resulting in one youth being shot dead.
Comment by abu al-fin — January 16, 2008 @ 2:24 pm
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