In a front-page article on Jan. 2 of this year, The New York Times took a brief respite from its ongoing canonization of Barack Obama and returned to its series on violent crimes committed by returning GIs, or as I call it: “U.S. Military, Psycho Killers.”

The Treason Times’ series about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans accused of murder began in January last year but was quickly discontinued as readers noticed that the Times doggedly refused to provide any statistics comparing veterans with any other group.

So they waited a year, hoping readers wouldn’t notice they were still including no relevant comparisons for the implicit claim that veterans are especially murderous.

Forget comparing veteran murderers to the population at large. The germane comparison is between veterans and the general population of young males. The general population includes housewives, grandmothers and little old men in nursing homes. But violent crime is committed almost exclusively by young men.

Consequently, any group composed primarily of young men will contain a mammoth number of murderers compared to the entire population.

Consider the harmless fantasy game, Dungeons and Dragons. After a number of murders were committed in the ’80s by Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts, some people concluded the game led to murderous tendencies. Another explanation is that it’s a game that happens to be played almost exclusively by young men.

For its series about how America’s finest young men are really a bunch of psychopathic cutthroats, the Times triumphantly produced 121 homicides committed by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Perhaps the Times’ next major expose could be on how a huge percentage of murderers are people who won’t ask for directions or share the TV remote.

Let’s compare murders by veterans to murders by other 18- to 35-year-olds in the U.S. population at large. From 1976 to 2005, 18- to 24-year-olds — both male and more gentle females — committed homicide at a rate of 29.9 per 100,000.

Since 9/11, about 1.6 million troops have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. That makes the homicide rate among veterans of these wars 7.6 per 100,000 — or about one-third the homicide rate for their age group (18 to 35) in the general population of both sexes.

But fewer than 200,000 of the 1.6 million troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been women, and the murder rate for the general population includes both males and females. Inasmuch as males commit nearly 90 percent of all murders, the rate for males in those age groups is probably nearly double the male/female combined rates, which translates to about 30 to 55 murderers per 100,000 males aged 18 to 35.

So comparing the veterans’ murder rate to only their male counterparts in the general population, we see that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are about 10 times less likely to commit a murder than non-veterans.

But as long as the Times has such a burning interest in the root causes of murder, how about considering the one factor more likely to create a murderer than any other? That is the topic we’re not allowed to discuss: single motherhood.

As I describe in my new book, “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America,” controlling for socioeconomic status, race and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent. (The second strongest factor is owning a Dennis Kucinich bumper sticker.)

By 1996, 70 percent of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers. Seventy percent of dropouts, suicides, runaways, teenage births, juvenile delinquents and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers. Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced.

A 1990 study by the left-wing Progressive Policy Institute showed that, after controlling for single motherhood, the difference in black and white crime disappeared.

Various studies come up with slightly different numbers, but all the figures are grim. A study cited in the far left-wing Village Voice found that children brought up in single-mother homes “are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.”

With new children being born, running away, dropping out of high school and committing murder every year, it’s not a static problem to analyze. But however the numbers are run, single motherhood is a societal nuclear bomb.

Even in liberals’ fevered nightmares, predatory mortgage dealers, oil speculators and Ken Lay could never do as much harm to their fellow human beings as single mothers do to their own children, to say nothing of society at large.

Think I’m being cruel? Imagine an America with 60 to 70 percent fewer juvenile delinquents, teenage births, teenage suicides and runaways, and you will appreciate what the sainted “single mothers” have accomplished.

But the Times won’t run that series because liberals cheer for the dissolution of traditional marriage in America. They detest the military, so they cite a few anecdotal examples of veterans who have committed murder and hope that no one asks for details.

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