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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