Baghdad on The Potomac

Maybe St. McCain should have saved the taxpayer a couple of bucks and just had his Dukakis-in-a-tank moment in D.C..

On March 14th, Kahane received another e-mail from [Army Medical Services Corps Captain Christopher D.] Mayhugh, with the subject “Medical school scholarships still available.” This time, rather than invoking European and tropical destinations, Mayhugh addressed the prospect of being posted to a less than desirable locale. “What if you get sent to Iraq?” he wrote in the letter’s final paragraph. He continued:

Well, consider this: there has been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The rate in Washington, D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation’s Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.

I thought New York was worse than Baghdad? Whatever. This lie has been floating around for at least a year. Or four years.