Reply #4: He came up with some bogus math... [View All]

[w13rd0]

...to try and tell people that soldiers in Iraq had less chance of dying than being murdered in California. Brit Hume said that California, being the same size as Iraq, had 6.6 murders per day (among a population of 34 million or something) and that was higher than the 1.2 soldiers dying in Iraq daily (among a troop deployment of 140 thousand). See, he forgot to divide by the sample size for the true numbers, which would most accurately be stated in deaths per hundred thousand. The proper calculation would yield:

Chance of soldier dying in Iraq: 1 in 100,000 / day
Chance of being murdered in California: .019 in 100,000 /day

that's just rough guesses though, I'm sure some statistician has done the actual math...