We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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The exit strategy Bush needs… This gem is of unknown true provenance but I found it amongst the Freepers:
If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraqi theater during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death ratio of 60 per 100,000.
The firearm death ratio in DC is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation’s Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.
Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of … WASHINGTON, DC!
Sounds like an excellent strategy to me.
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Wonderful – Should read “More guns less crime” by John Lott
The vast majority of ‘ordinary crime’ in Iraq (by that I mean crime that’s not directly related to the insurgency) has gone through the roof in many parts of Iraq. Most of this is unreported in the media as ‘ordinary crime’ isnt as newsworthy as explodijng car bombs etc..
I dont know – perhaps you’d like car bombs, mortar attacks and suicide missions in Washington DC? Armed militia roaming the streets? US helicopters hovering overhead your house firing on people?
Andrew, I don’t think that was what was being suggested. Perhaps you should check this out.
Oh and when I lived in Los Angeles, I heard shooting frequently and a day did not go by without police heliciopters overhead (yeah it was kind of a shitty area).
Funny. But to have a stab at comparing like with like, what’s the firearm death ratio (we’re including suicide bombs here I think) among either the DC police, or the Iraqi population as a whole?
while I would like to agree with you that living in washington is more dangerous than our army in iraq,stats I have found say the total murder rate in DC is 40 per 100 thousand ,so you are 50 percent safer in DC than iraq.. not that is exactly bragging..
You don’t have to go to LA to hear gunfire all the time. I heard plenty of it at night when I was at Hull Uni.
I would much rather be in one of the Kurdish parts of Iraq than I would be in DC.
Total combat deaths is much higher, about 370 combat deaths per year per 100,000 troops.
See, e.g., http://icasualties.org/oif/Details.aspx
Sure Ken, but not even the NRA is arguing for mortars, grenades and car bombs to be legalised in the USA, just to keep firearms legal.
According to the FBI, the murder rate in DC in 2004 was 33.7 per 100,000 population. This is lower than in 2003, which is in turn lower than in 2002.
EG
Most murders in DC are ‘black on black’: the murder rate blacks face is consequently higher than the published averages. The rate faced by whites, especially in the sort of suburbs politicians frequent, is correspondingly (much) lower.
The political meaning of all this ambiguous, to say the least. Limitations pushed by well-meaning liberals play a significant part in the failure of law enforcement to deliver a secure environment. Liberals never have to face the consequences of the restrictions they push, because they don’t ever live where they have the most deadly impact.
The racial partition of murder in DC is what I was getting at. Figures for Iraqi casualties in the continuing low-level conflict are quite hard to discern. They are very probably rather higher than those among US troops, in absolute terms, but what’s the rate and how would withdrawing affect it? I’ve no idea.
In comparison the total number of firearm deaths among Washingtonian government servants, as opposed to the poorer locals, is pretty low. Withdrawing them’s not going to make much difference to the death rate there.
As if the insane taxes weren’t enough to drive people away from DC – or the surrounding area, for that matter.
Texas rocks!
DC is a microcosm of America– racially assorted, with tacit, voluntary but almost complete b/w apartheid in residential and school districts. Many white bureaucrats live over the river in Virginia, commuting along well-patrolled corridors but never turning off (cf ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, a prophetic text) into the danger zones and urban badlands.
I have met Americans who are astonished at the lack of racial stratification in London suburbia. It is curious that in the Land of the PC Free, flatsharers are still legally permitted to stipulate the race of those with whom they wish to cohabit: ‘Single White Female’ etc. But like the abandonment of busing, perhaps that a the quid pro quo for the official multicultiness of the USA: ‘we’ll subsidise the non-whites if we don’t have to live with them’. Apartheid ensures that most violent crime is not black-on-white/oriental/Jew.
It is curious that in the Land of the PC Free, flatsharers are still legally permitted to stipulate the race of those with whom they wish to cohabit: ‘Single White Female’ etc.
Flatsharers are (or should be) legally permitted to stipulate any qualifications for potential roommates – religion, political party, hair color, enviro-friendnliness, etc. (And certainly gender and sexual orientation.) That’s comes with being PC free, and free from government telling us how we should discriminate in our personal relationships.