Living here in Texas, I was kind of surprised when I saw this story that claimed Mexico was the 2nd deadliest conflict in the world last year. What? Really? I read the story and it struck me that there was no discussion of the relative sizes of the countries being discussed. The population of Syria is around 17 million while the population of Mexico is around 120 million. Therefore, with 7 times the population, Mexico has seen less than half as many deaths. One out of every 340 Syrians was killed last year vs. one out of every 5,200 Mexicans. Rounding out the list, Afghanistan was the second deadliest with 1 in 2,100 killed, followed by Iraq with 1 in 2,500, and finally Yemen with 1 in 3,600. Of course, St. Louis saw 1 out of 1,667 citizens killed in 2015, making that city deadlier than all of these countries except Syria. See, I can use statistics too.
Someone started looking at absolute number of people killed rather than the ratio of people killed to population and decided on a shocking headline. Not to minimize the large number of deaths that surround the drug cartels in Mexico, but it isn't in the same league with these Middle Eastern war zones.
1 comment:
Mexico was just ranked the second deadliest country in the world, after only Syria. Drug trade is largely the cause. We will BUILD THE WALL!
@realDonaldTrump - 6-22-17
Looks like President Trump must have seen this story and is trying to leverage it for his proposed wall. I don't know if he realizes the story is just cherry-picking of statistics but that doesn't matter; as is, it supports his goals as reported.
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