Noted in passing: The “Vets as Murderers” meme as pushed by the NYT being reacted to by Phil Carter: [1]
So, basically, the reporters went trolling on Lexis-Nexis and other databases to find “murder” within the same paragraph as “veteran” or “soldier,” and built a front-page story around that research. They compared the pre-war numbers to the post-war numbers and found that, voila!, there’s a difference. And then it looks like they cherry-picked the best anecdotes out of that research (including the ones where they could get interviews and photos) to craft a narrative which fit the data.
The article makes no attempt to produce a statistically valid comparison of homicide rates among vets to rates among the general population. Nor does it rely at all on Pentagon data about post-deployment incidents of violence among veterans. It basically just generalizes from this small sample (121 out of 1.7 million Iraq and Afghanistan vets, not including civilians and contractors) to conclude that today’s generation of veterans are coming home full of rage and ready to kill.
This would be about typical for the New York Times. As a matter of fact, if there’s anything in surprises me about this, it’s that anybody is surprised about this. The liberal press in this country… as led by the New York Times… has long been trying to root against the United States, and those willing to place their lives in the line in her defense.
As Carter points out, it’s true; veterans face many challenges when they come home. It is in fact one of the costs of war, I’m afraid. But that cost is minimal in comparison to what we would have suffered as a nation and as a world, had we not responded.
However, bad as the plight of some of the returning veterans has been, it is made worse by the kind of rhetoric being engaged in by the New York Times. The kind of nonsense that they are engaging in serves to do nothing but push such veterans away from mainstream America. Frankly, I cannot help but think that that is exactly what they’re aiming at, given the rhetoric that they’ve been engaging in since Vietnam.
[2]And I suspect and suppose that there are other types of government service which give rise to murders faster than the Army. Do you suppose, for example we mightg see an article on post office workers sometime soon? Or would that annoy the postal workers union, whence the left and thereby the NYT gets a lot of it’s support?