Yesterday, I read this Iowa Liberal post and asked the question, "How many thousands of veterans are there?" The typical firestorm of name-calling and invectives followed, including Jeromy Brown sneering, "Don’t you wish Sharon would just make her point?"
In fact, Jeromy did get the point without me having to say anything more than ask the one question (I love when liberals go mad because you ask them a common sense question). The post essentially mocked any conservative questioning the methodology involved in a story suggesting our soldiers, like in the movies, come back from war to rape, pillage, and kill here at home. Alas, as my question implied, the truth isn't nearly as grim as liberals would have us believe.
Fortunately, I didn't need to go do the legwork to debunk the New York Times article myself. Col. Ralph Peters did it for me.
The Times did get one basic fact right: Returning vets committed or are charged with 121 murders in the United States since our current wars began.
Had the Times' "journalists" and editors bothered to put those figures in context - which they carefully avoided doing - they would've found that the murder rate that leaves them so aghast means that our vets are five times less likely to commit a murder than their demographic peers...
A very conservative estimate of how many different service members have passed through Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait since 2003 is 350,000 (and no, that's not double-counting those with repeated tours of duty).
Now consider the Justice Department's numbers for murders committed by all Americans aged 18 to 34 - the key group for our men and women in uniform. To match the homicide rate of their peers, our troops would've had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007.
In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent.
Now, of course, the snarky post at Iowa Liberal wasn't really about the 121 murders committed by veterans. Rather, it was pitying our servicemen and women for having to go fight in nasty wars. As one commenter said,
Sharon, if just ONE veteran has these issues, isn’t that enough, considering what we’ve asked them to sacrifice? Or is it simply collateral damage, acceptable because of the big picture?
The truth is, these types of commenters (including one who claims to be a health care professional and evidently sees some horrifically large percentage of veterans and their families living with hellish levels of violence) don't display any actual respect for active duty military personnel. Rather than supporting the mission that these volunteer military personnel signed up for, they want to "bring the troops home," which isn't really because the troops want this but because they are liberals who oppose the war. In other words, this is just one more political argument to be debated.
Like the original New York Times article, the post (and its comments) has little substance and certainly none of the "compassion" liberals claim to embrace.
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