Obama: Contain Radical Islam. Trump: Obliterate Radical Islam

[Weatherman2020]

The world is paying the price for the last eight years of American weakness. Now it's cleanup time, and it will be messy.

Trump deplores ‘evil losers’ who bombed Manchester concert

 

[Dogmaphobe]

The very word "radical" only obfuscated what is actually happening, however. By restricting the word "radical" to only those actively involved in violence, we fail to note the real problem, which has to do with ENORMOUS numbers of Muslims and not just a few. It isn't just that a healthy percentage supports the terrorism, but that mainstream Muslims support the same aims, even if they stop short of sanction the violence -- namely, the spread of Islam.

Europe is Dar al Harb. They want it to be Dar al Islam.

 

[bill718]

The world is paying the price for the last eight years of American weakness. Now it's cleanup time, and it will be messy.

Trump deplores ‘evil losers’ who bombed Manchester concert

Good plan skippy!! George W Bush tried the same thing, all we got in return was a damaged military machine, lot's of soldiers with their limbs blown off, and a massive national debt. Any other bright ideas??

 

[Weatherman2020]

The world is paying the price for the last eight years of American weakness. Now it's cleanup time, and it will be messy.

Trump deplores ‘evil losers’ who bombed Manchester concert

Good plan skippy!! George W Bush tried the same thing, all we got in return was a damaged military machine, lot's of soldiers with their limbs blown off, and a massive national debt. Any other bright ideas??

How many Manchesters in America the past decade?

 

[Brain357]

The world is paying the price for the last eight years of American weakness. Now it's cleanup time, and it will be messy.

Trump deplores ‘evil losers’ who bombed Manchester concert

Good plan skippy!! George W Bush tried the same thing, all we got in return was a damaged military machine, lot's of soldiers with their limbs blown off, and a massive national debt. Any other bright ideas??

Don't forget a really high suicide rate among veterans.

 

[Weatherman2020]

The world is paying the price for the last eight years of American weakness. Now it's cleanup time, and it will be messy.

Trump deplores ‘evil losers’ who bombed Manchester concert

Good plan skippy!! George W Bush tried the same thing, all we got in return was a damaged military machine, lot's of soldiers with their limbs blown off, and a massive national debt. Any other bright ideas??

Don't forget a really high suicide rate among veterans.

Fake news.
Here's the numbers being quoted:

In 2012, for the first time in at least a generation, the number of active-duty soldiers who killed themselves, 177, exceeded the 176 who were killed while in the war zone. To put that another way, more of America's serving soldiers died at their own hands than in pursuit of the enemy.

OK: obviously that's both 177 and 176 too many. But is that 177 something unexpected, out of the ordinary?

The US active service military is some 1.5 million strong. The general suicide rate among all Americans is 12 per 100,000 per year. So, 15 x 12 would give us the expected number of suicides among active duty military: 180 per year. But that's not quite right for a number of reasons: the most obvious being that they're talking about "soldiers" not military. There's some 600,000 (A note about numbers here. Getting the first digit and the number of digits correct is enough. Measuring the number of solders to the 6 th digit would just give a spurious sense of accuracy.) apparently, meaning that our expected number would be 6 x 12, or 72.

Ah, but wait, by far the majority of those active service members will be male (women only just this past week being cleared for combat operations for example) so perhaps we should use the male suicide rate, not the population one? At around 25 that gives us 6 x 25: 150. It's not immediately apparent that the suicide rate in active service troops is higher than that of the general population. Especially when we add one more point:

There is one suicide for every 25 attempted suicides

I don't think it's all that much of a stretch to suggest that active duty troops, those who by definition have access to live ammunition and a gun, have a slightly different ratio of attempts to actual suicide.

We can go on with the numbers:

Across all branches of the US military and the reserves, a similar disturbing trend was recorded. In all, 349 service members took their own lives in 2012, while a lesser number, 295, died in combat.

All military is more like 2.3 million people. 23 x 25 gives us 575 as our expected number assuming the military is all male. So the suicide rate seems to be lower than that of the male population (although higher than that expected from the rate for the general population, which would be 276).

one of an astonishing 6,500 former military personnel who killed themselves in 2012, roughly equivalent to one every 80 minutes.

And yes, that is a high and shocking number. But apparently there are 21 million veterans in the US. 95% of them male so using again the male suicide rate we'd expect 5,250.

It's just very difficult indeed to see that there is an epidemic of suicides in the military: either serving personnel or veterans. Within the limits of the statistics being used the rates seem to be a little below or a little above those for American men generally. I just don't see where the "epidemic" comes from.

But There Isn't An Epidemic Of Suicide In The US Military