King's A Liar - Baghdad is 35 Times More Dangerous Than New York City

[MannyGoldstein]

I saw some discussion on this, so I thought I'd post this from my blog, www.blueworksbetter.com. The bottom line is that King is way, way off on his figures. Iraq is not a safe place.

"Apparently a Republican Congressman from Iowa, Steve King, is wandering around claiming that Iraq currently has a lower violent death rate than many US cities. He claims a violent death rate of 25.71 for Iraq, which would put the death rate lower than New Orleans (56.0 per 100,000 in 2004), Baltimore (43.5), Detroit (42.1), Washington D.C. (35.8) and Atlanta (26.0).

If King's number was accurate, that is.

It is occasionally the case that statistics (particularly Right-wing statistics) are inaccurate, so, being a numbers guy, I decided to roll up my sleeves and dig into his number. So I spent a few minutes going over the Iraq Index to count the number of violent deaths in Iraq last month (April). I then divided that into the population of Iraq, and I got around 40 deaths per 100,000 per year, almost twice what King claims.

Sadly, this is still lower than New Orleans, Baltimore, and Detroit.

However, comparing the violent death rate in a single city to one across an entire country is not a fair comparison - better to compare city to city, no?

Baghdad might be a good place to start. From the Washington Post:

"Baghdad's main morgue -- which handles only the remains of victims of violent or suspicious deaths, not including bombing victims -- issued 1,155 death certificates in April, the U.N. agency reported...

The morgue issued even more death certificates for killings in Baghdad in March -- 1,294, the U.N. report said. Most of the victims were shot to death."

The population of Baghdad is about 6 million. Using the morgue figures from the last two months, we can extrapolate to get 14,700 deaths per year. Using the magic of math, that works out to a sad 245 violent deaths per 100,000 people in Baghdad, per year.

So Baghdad's violent death rate is about five times that of our most dangerous city, New Orleans. Or 35 times higher than New York City (7.0 in 2004), a city with a similar population.

So sad."

Feel free to spank King on this via his email page

[redqueen]

1. Thanks...

:kick:

[Buzz Clik]

2. When a politician gets his info from a cartoon...

...bad things can happen.

[ComerPerro]

3. So lets get his ass over there, unescorted, and see what happens

[acmavm]

4. That's what this overweight, overbearing Triumph riding biker

wanna-be exec at this place said last week. He got mad because I would not back down when he told me it's safer in Iraq (the whole country mind you) than Washington D.C.