I take great issue with the statement: "...it is reasonable to expect that a population of young men trained in warfare would commit crimes at higher rates..." This shows the author's complete lack of understanding of the culture of military discipline. If you agree that young men and women sign up for military service with at least a modicum of patriotism and sense of sacrifice and also concede that these recruits then undergo a stringent training regimine that inculcates a respect for authority what other conclusion could "reasonable" person infer? I suggest the author meet with actual servicemen and women before making such an il--informed statement. The fact that crimes by servicemen get greater media coverage than similar civilian crimes is due in large part to the cognitive dissonance between the crimes and the usually stellar sorts persons commiting them.

I think you are being a little disingenuous. There are some reasons to expect higher crimes rates among the military some reasons to expect lower.

As the author pointed out as a matter of fact they are lower so it looks like the reasons to expect lower rates win out. We should be thankful for this, but trying to take umbrage with what was a simple article which generally as far as I can discern agrees with your point of view is just trying way too hard.

No, it is not disingenuous at all to take offense at that statement.

The mental shorthand used to blithely equate criminals and Soldiers betrays what the author really thinks about members of our military. That is, 'they are mostly aggressive young men, aggressive young men commit most of our crimes, therefore Soldiers must commit most of crimes.'

It is that sort of thinking that leads people to make statements like "If the military has trouble finding recruits, we should give our judges a sentencing option to put convicts into the military and solve both the recruiting problem and prison overcrowding problem." (An actual statement made by an undergraduate student at Northeastern University, which was met by general assent in the class, including the professor) That's just in my personal experience (frustrating!).

The attitude is born of ignorance about who joins the military and the difference between volunteering to serve and being arrested, tried and convicted. Also, ignorance of what it means to be "trained in warfare." Having been through various training and actual warfare (Army, 2001-2009) I can confirm that there no training that includes murdering unarmed people. The author may suggest: "What's the difference, shooting people is shooting people?" I'd answer: "We expect everyone, not just Soldiers, to know the difference between murder and self-defense and act accordingly." We do not train murderers.

It is no different if had the author stated: it is reasonable to expect a higher crime rate around historically black colleges because of the dense population of minorities there. So, yes, it is offensive. But, kudos for finding the truth about our military members and plainly setting it out in the article.

I have to agree with the OP. Sitting at the breakfast table with my (military) husband, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the headline on Slate's homepage: "Is there a lot of crime on military bases? Not as much as you'd think." The assumption there (well, of course we'd expect tons of crime, but we found they don't always manage to torture a small animal and kill a child before breakfast. Shocking!) is disappointing, not just from the author, but what that says about the framework of his audience at large. Then in the article, the sentence highlighted by the OP shot my eyebrows to my hairline. So this, I thought, is what the general population thinks of the military then. They don't know the difference between soldiers and hoodlums or how much safer the spouses I know feel living on base then off. I'm glad the OP said something.

My own guess is that the general population would disagree with the author's assumption. We expect soldiers to have a wild side but to generally be self-disciplined and law abiding.

I don't think even the author really thinks it. Just a rhetorical construct to bounce the rest of the article off of.

I hope so. I guess I would like to see some evidence that the general population does disagree. With the OP's anecdote about the college class and my own experiences with the seemingly prevalent opinion among civilians that only people with "no other options" would choose to go into the military, this was further depressing my hope for better civilian-military relations. At least the "no other options" comes from a misguided (and often obnoxious) attempt at sympathy/pity -the idea that we were forced into this by our socioeconomic situation as if military service was a kind of prostitution- the idea that the people who go into the military are either criminals or trained to be criminals is even more sad/infuriating. When that Marine killed his pregnant ex-girlfriend and fled to Mexico and some non-military people said that they were sure How to Hide A Body is boot-camp 101 and that the military is like the mob and probably his superiors helped him out, I assumed they were a kind of lunatic fringe. I had never seen even a hint of that kind of thinking from a place like Slate, so it meant more to read it here. It's harder to dismiss or see it as not representative of mainstream thinking.

You guys realize the authors don't write the headlines?

They have specialists who custom design them to maximize clicks and they are often actively misleading about the content of the article.

I think you are being a little disingenuous. There are some reasons to expect higher crimes rates among the military some reasons to expect lower.

No this is typical lefty thinking. We see this reasoning all the time from the left "What do you expect from people trained to kill?" and other similar garbage. The left loves to use words like "bloodlust" and "thrill of the kill" to describe soldiers. Only to turn around and defend gang members that commit horrific crimes as being "misunderstood," "product of poverty," or some other such nonsense.

Yes soldiers commit crimes, but it is a fact that they do it at significantly lower rates than their peers in the general population. Perhaps the left should show more respect for soldiers and a little less concern for how burglary/rapists get life terms or sympathy for minorities who hide a dozen of their victims bodies under their home.

Arbios,

The writer is saying that some people may wrongly operate under the assumption that trained warriors are more likely to be criminal, and then spends the whole article knocking that assumption down. It is not to suggest that the writer himself holds that assumption.

Gee maybe crime rates are lower on posts are because many of the enviromental causes of crime are not there. They have secure housing, income and a supportive community that shares many of the same stresses.

Yeah, army bases would be really great places to live. Except for the guns. And the sudden travel excursions.

I do realize that. That's why elsewhere, I called out Daniel specifically. He didn't WRITE the subhed, but he can get it fixed.

RE: Becephalus You realize we're taking issue with more than the headline? It's not like there's some disconnect between the headline and the article's content.

Isara71:

Gee maybe crime rates are lower on posts are because many of the enviromental causes of crime are not there. They have secure housing, income and a supportive community that shares many of the same stresses.

Gee, maybe one can understand the root causes of crime and still want to hold criminals responsible for their crimes?

Re: "Typical Lefty Thinking" I've run into just as many conservatives who misunderstand the military as liberals and just as many liberals who genuinely support the individual servicemember as conservatives. And there are quite a few liberals serving in the military. So I don't think it is a left/right divide so much as a military/civilian divide. It does make me wonder when this whole mess got started. Did the military lose its noble associations about the same time that people became more distrustful of the government in general? And now it perpetuates itself: if a portion of the population stays away from military service because of negative beliefs, what chance is there to dispel them? And if you run military presence off of certain college campuses, what does that do other than make it so there are that many fewer officers from those places in the military? Does Berkeley really ultimately want a military that comes entirely from, say, Texas? <link>