2 dead, 17 wounded in overnight shootings across city (Guess Where)

[The Magistrate]

16. You Do Understand, Mr. Caulfield, That Your Juggled Statistics Compare Apples To Oranges....

You are attempting to suggest by quoting numbers that Chicago is more dangerous to its citizens than Afghanistan is to U.S. soldiers. But there are more than twenty-five times as many people in Chicago than there are U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, so actually a soldier in Afghanistan runs roughly twelve to fifteen times the chance of being killed by hostile action. The matter is further muddied by the fact that, so far as wars go, U.S. forces in Afghanistan suffer unusually few fatalities. Casualty rates in Viet Nam, on a per capita engaged calculation, ran at rates five to six times higher than rates in Afghanistan, and casualty rates in U.S. combat units in WWII ran even higher than that. To go and shoot the whole works, the number of U.S. soldiers who die in a month in Afghanistan is generally less than the number of people who die of all causes in Chicago on a typical day ( heart failure of one sort or another accounting for nearly half of them, and dwarfing the number dead as a result of crime ). Thus, given the relative size of the populations, a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan is not much more likely to die of hostile action than a typical urban civilian is to die of natural causes, which establishes the Afghan War as one of the safest in history for a combatant force on one side, and demonstrates it is certainly not to be taken as some kind of metric for extreme danger, which it is then pretended a city in the U.S. exceeds.