re: Obama bemoans 'epidemic of violence' – this article (July 15th 2007) has a major flaw in that it failed to call Obama on making a very faulty comparison.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/07/15/politics/p132635D02.DTL&type=politicsBy NATHANIEL HERNANDEZ
Associated Press Writer
”CHICAGO - Standing before a church congregation that has witnessed
inner-city violence firsthand, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack
Obama said Sunday that more must be done to end a social ill that is
"sickening the soul of this nation."
Obama told churchgoers at the Vernon Park Church of God on Chicago's
South Side that too many young lives are being claimed by violence and
more must be done to combat the problem…
......
Nearly three dozen Chicago students have been killed this year, according to Chicago Public Schools. Obama said that figure is higher than the number of Illinois serviceman who've died in Iraq in 2007....”
OBAMA was comparing apples to oranges folks - domestic crime vs. the war in Iraq - but apparently AP reporter didn't see or failed to comment on the very faulty numerical comparison Obama just made:
While there is certainly an epidemic of violence recently (my town of Orlando has had record murder rates in the last few years) Obama is totally wrong in this argument (comparing youth deaths in Chicago to IL soldiers killed in Iraq) because he isn't comparing like sized populations!
There are far more student aged persons in Chicago than there are Illinois soldiers in Iraq so this is a totally invalid comparison and it is the exact same type that Republicans use to argue that Iraq "isn't so bad" when the reality is that Iraq is much worse than anything anywhere in the U.S.A. - it's a WAR ZONE in Iraq folks!
There are a total of 160,000 U.S. troops give or take in Iraq - only a small portion of these come from the state of Illinois probably no more than a few thousand - according to this Congressman's website there are only 2400 ING soldiers in Iraq:
http://www.house.gov/list/hearing/il10_kirk/natlguardreservists.htmlAccording to this website there have been 129 Illinois based casualties in the war.
You would need to extrapolate the number of IL casualties by the ratio of ING soldiers in Iraq to the average population of student aged residents of Chicago over the past few years to get a reasonable comparison...
According to this website:
http://chicago.about.com/b/a/215535.htmThere are 200,962 students of approximately high school age (15-19) and another 239,252 of approximately college age (20-24). That's about 440,000 persons of "student" age in Chicago or about 183 times as many ING troops as in Iraq.
Therefore to compare apples to apples you'd need to multiply the 129 IL soldier deaths in Iraq by 183 times to get a reasonable estimate (23607 since March 2003) for comparing the crime rate in Chicago vs. deaths in Iraq.
In other words if there had been approximately 23,607 murders in the metro Chicago area since March 2003 then Obama would right in claiming Chicago were worse than Iraq.
But there HASN'T BEEN... Obama's off by over an order of magnitude when we compare apples to apples.
According to this website:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20061222/ai_n17073001there have been about 450 murders a year over the last several years- even if we allow for a spike of 25% in the last year - in the 53 months since the war began in Iraq there would have been only 2100 murders in Chicago.
In other words Chicago only has about 8.89% the murder rate per capita of those ING soldiers killed in Iraq - 2100 vs. 23,607.
and THAT is why this is fallacious reasoning and why Obama is wrong to go around saying it.
It's the same kind of rhetoric Republicans have repeatedly used to falsely claim that Iraq was less dangerous than (pick a city) - Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, NYC and now we can add Chicago to that list.
Crime in cities is certainly up all across the boards and an issue we need to address as Democrats but until we start having 600 to 1,000 murders a month in major American cities, nothing that is happening here even comes close to what is happening in Iraq and we should refrain from making this invalid comparison!
Respectfully,
Doug De Clue
Orlando, FL