Coleman funeral, Pikeville

The funeral of U.S. Army Sgt. Gary Brent Coleman, 24, in Pikeville, KY, 11/30/03
Photo: Shawn Poynter, for AP

The country is waging a war, but the war isn’t being waged equally. The death toll in North Dakota and Vermont, for example, is about five times that of Washington, D.C.

It is not surprising that the more rural states are the ones with the highest death rates. (To calculate a death rate, we divided the number of men and women killed from a state by the total number of people in the state of military age. Death rates are given in number of casualties per million people of military age.) Rural communities have a considerably higher rate of casualties than U.S. cities. (See this report from the Carsey Institute.)

The ten states with the highest death rates are Idaho, Delaware, Alaska, Maine, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota and Vermont.

The states with the lowest rates: Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Utah, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and D.C.

Anybody notice a pattern here?

Below is a numerical listing of all U.S. states’ casualties in the Iraq War, ranked from the lowest death rate to the highest.

Rank State Number of Deaths Death Rate
per million population 18-54
1 Washington, DC 4 11.9
2 New Jersey 61 13.7
3 Connecticut 28 15.7
4 New York 169 16.7
5 Utah 21 17.8
6 Rhode Island 10 17.9
7 Massachusetts 66 19.2
8 Minnesota 52 19.7
9 Illinois 134 20.2
10 Florida 163 20.5
11 North Carolina 90 20.5
12 California 384 20.9
13 Colorado 55 22.5
14 Washington 73 22.7
15 Georgia 104 22.8
16 Maryland 68 23.7
17 Missouri 71 24.4
18 Hawaii 16 24.7
19 Michigan 132 25.1
20 South Carolina 54 25.2
21 Alabama 59 25.3
22 Tennessee 79 25.9
23 Virginia 103 26.3
24 Indiana 85 26.4
25 Ohio 157 26.4
26 Kentucky 59 27.2
27 Wisconsin 79 27.9
28 Kansas 39 27.9
29 Pennsylvania 176 27.9
30 Texas 320 28.3
31 West Virginia 27 28.6
32 Iowa 43 28.7
33 New Mexico 29 30.9
34 Mississippi 48 32.4
35 Oklahoma 58 32.5
36 Nevada 35 32.5
37 Arkansas 45 33.0
38 Arizona 89 33.5
39 Louisiana 79 33.6
40 New Hampshire 23 34.4
41 Oregon 65 35.5
42 Idaho 24 35.7
43 Delaware 15 36.1
44 Alaska 15 38.4
45 Maine 26 39.0
46 Wyoming 11 41.9
47 Nebraska 38 42.8
48 Montana 20 42.9
49 South Dakota 18 47.2
50 North Dakota 17 51.0
51 Vermont 19 58.1
       
 
  Total 3,655 24

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