Rick Malwitz writes that murder rates in the United States rival those of soldiers in Iraq:
“…it is not difficult to find conditions equivalent to combat in American cities,” Preston wrote, in a report published by the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center. “In Philadelphia the death rate for black males ages 20-34 in 2002 was 4.37 per 1,000, 11 percent higher than for troops in Iraq.”
Philadelphia had 406 murders in 2006, giving it the highest murder rate of major American cities. Six of the victims were under the age of 1.
The United States military suffered 821 deaths in Iraq in 2006. About 600 were hostile deaths. Philadelphia alone had nearly two-thirds the number of hostile deaths in Iraq.
But the deadliest event in Pennsylvania in 2006 was not even in one of its cities. That event took place at a schoolhouse in Amish country in October, when a gunman killed five girls before turning the gun on himself.
Most of the soldiers sent to Iraq are in support missions. The risk of Marines going to door-to-door in Fallujah is obviously higher than young men walking on Broad Street in North Philly.
But the fact that we can even begin to compare Iraq with the streets of Newark and Philadelphia, and one-room schools in Amish country, is a reflection of the mean society we live in.
It shocked me to read that Philadelphia’s young black men have a higher death rate than the troop in Iraq. Imagine the innocent little children growing up in Philadelphia, trapped in a warzone. I expect that, thanks to those dangerously violent conditions, the children that survive often turn into violent criminals themselves.
If the United States stopped wasting tons of resources on needless wars, perhaps the Untied States could put those resources into stabilizing its own country. With so many people getting raped, murdered, and victimized on our own soil, we need to stop that with our resources; not start trouble elsewhere.
How can we have trillions of dollars to waste futilely trying to stabilize other countries, and yet we cannot (or just don’t) stabilize our own. We need to stop the over 24 million victimizations that occur on our own soil yearly.
What do you think?
