[pauldenton]

I guess I got caught in the narrative. I still remember Spike Lee's movie Chiraq. from 2003-2012. During that nine-year period, 4,265 citizens were killed in Chicago, which is nearly the number of U.S. soldiers who were killed in Iraq. The idea you have as much risk being shot as an American citizen in the war zone of Iraq as you would walking the streets of the south side of Chicago.

The risk of a man 18 to 29 years old dying in a shooting in the most violent ZIP code in Chicago — 60624, a swath of the West Side that includes Garfield Park — was higher than the death rate for U.S. soldiers in the Afghanistan war or for soldiers in an Army combat brigade that fought in Iraq, according to a study in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. Among men 18 to 29, the annual rate of firearm homicides in that ZIP code was 1,277 per 100,000 people in 2021 and 2022, the study found, compared with an annual death rate for U.S. troops in a heavily engaged combat brigade in Iraq of 675 per 100,000. The most violent ZIP codes in Philadelphia surpassed the risk of combat death by military service members, too, but the death rate there was lower than in Chicago, the study found. New York and Los Angeles didn’t have any areas that were so deadly.

[ceejayoz]

Soldiers in Iraq wear armor, travel in armored vehicles, have trained medical first responders seconds away, and can call in a helicopter medivac in minutes. They are disproportionately likely to survive a shootout versus a random civilian.