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Comment by jghn | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to know what makes them think this actually happened in the first place

50 every weekend is an exaggeration, but more people were murdered in Chicago from 2001 to 2021 than American soldiers died during the Global War on Terror (6,593 died in Iraq and Afghanistan vs. 11,561 in Chicago).

This is something of a red herring though as somewhere around 75% of those murders are black-on-black, with only a minority involving Latinos. Chicago primarily attracts attention not because of its murder rate (#22 in the country vs. Detroit at #5), but instead due to the size of its population and the prevalence of violent music that has come out of the region.

My take the high murder rate among blacks in Chicago is due to Slavery, Jim Crow, followed by decades of racist therefor ineffective policing. That toxic racism is also what's motivating the ICE terrorizing.

Not to dispute your point, but the GWoT was shockingly low casualty for the Americans. Almost 10x as many Americans died in the Vietnam war (58,281 US military KIA), mostly between 1965 and 1971, peaking at 16,899 in '68 alone. There are lots of reasons for this, including the different styles and intensities of fighting, the soldiers used (GWoT was all volunteer after all), improvements in transport and trauma care, and the sheer technological lead that the US held. GWoT was really an example of punching down counterinsurgency, not a real "war" in a lot of ways.

Not counting, of course, the 30,177 suicides by American veterans in the wake of the global war on terror.

https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/sites/default/files/pape...

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