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Thursday, February 28, 2013

13,000 More Names to the List

13,000 More Names to the List

A study released by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) at the beginning of February attracted a great deal of attention and concern. The VA announced the rate of veteran suicides in the United States at 22 per day, an increase of 22 percent over the previous estimate of 18 suicides a day. This newest measure, in a decade of disgraces exuding from 11+ years of wars overseas, came from the VA looking at data with a slightly greater focus and increasing the number of states contributing data, by three, from 18 to 21 (yes, in 2013 we are currently only assembling data on veterans suicides from barely 2/5 of the country). Many veterans advocates believe this estimation to be an underestimate of the true number of daily veteran suicides due to the incomplete data assembled by the VA, the difficulties in standardizing data collection on veterans across the country, and the reality that less than 40 percent of our nation's veterans, and even less of our Afghan and Iraq war veterans, are registered and tracked by the VA. Still, with a veterans population that accounts for 7 percent of the U.S. population, but over 22 percent percent of suicides in the U.S., it is clearly not an overstatement to use the term epidemic or to note that this is one of multiple policy, economic and moral reasons why warfare over the last 60 years has been, and will continue to be, a fool's option for the United States.

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