Good news!
i found this (let's say) fascinating-- fascinating enough, at least, to induce me to break out the calculator and crunch some numbers: the AP reported today that only 718 Iraqis were killed in the last month. That is to say, the number of Iraqis killed as a result of violence in Iraq fell to 718 from some apparently higher number.
The number one killer in the U.S. is heart disease. So i thought i'd look up the statistics and compare our rather mundane serial killer (i.e. McDonalds, et al.) to the Iraqis' rather more flashy mode de mort of gundowns, shellings, bombings, beheadings, and otherwise generally being reduced by or to shrapnel.
There are just over 300,000,000 people in America. The statistics i found from the AHA are from 2004, but in 2004 157,600 folks clocked out from heart attacks. (Important note: this figure doesn't take into account any other form of CHD or vascular disease, generally.) That washes out to about 13,133 people per month, or about .0044% of our present population.
Iraq, according to the CIA's site, has approximately 27,500,000 folks: a tad over 9% of our population. If a mere 718 Iraqis a month are murdered (and do remember that's the lowest figure in the last year, which is why it made the news) it works out to 2,136 people per year. Each month, if it only stayed at that rate, Iraq loses about .0026% of its population to war-- over half the number per capita that we lose to myocardial infarcts.
Now, i realize that death is death, and once you're there, it doesn't much matter the cause; but here when someone dies a gruesome, intentioned death-- even if they were theretofore doing everything in their power to deserve it-- it makes national news. What would it be like if 7,800 people died each month from slaughter? That'd be .0026% of our population: two or three World Trade Center bombings each month.
And of course i'm not implying that we're doing the killing; it's a civil war. i'm just crunching numbers. But that's a helluva lot of people.
Bizarre world.
The number one killer in the U.S. is heart disease. So i thought i'd look up the statistics and compare our rather mundane serial killer (i.e. McDonalds, et al.) to the Iraqis' rather more flashy mode de mort of gundowns, shellings, bombings, beheadings, and otherwise generally being reduced by or to shrapnel.
There are just over 300,000,000 people in America. The statistics i found from the AHA are from 2004, but in 2004 157,600 folks clocked out from heart attacks. (Important note: this figure doesn't take into account any other form of CHD or vascular disease, generally.) That washes out to about 13,133 people per month, or about .0044% of our present population.
Iraq, according to the CIA's site, has approximately 27,500,000 folks: a tad over 9% of our population. If a mere 718 Iraqis a month are murdered (and do remember that's the lowest figure in the last year, which is why it made the news) it works out to 2,136 people per year. Each month, if it only stayed at that rate, Iraq loses about .0026% of its population to war-- over half the number per capita that we lose to myocardial infarcts.
Now, i realize that death is death, and once you're there, it doesn't much matter the cause; but here when someone dies a gruesome, intentioned death-- even if they were theretofore doing everything in their power to deserve it-- it makes national news. What would it be like if 7,800 people died each month from slaughter? That'd be .0026% of our population: two or three World Trade Center bombings each month.
And of course i'm not implying that we're doing the killing; it's a civil war. i'm just crunching numbers. But that's a helluva lot of people.
Bizarre world.
posted by c at 9:58 PM
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