Good data speak strongly
I can’t stand first-person shooters – wrong generation ;-), I liked #spacequest Space Quest; and I had the prejudice that they would lower threshold to violence. Well, this article from ars technica
debunked my prejudice fully with rather simple data: Video game spending per capita goes from 5 to 110 (units?), and gun-related murders are ≤0.5 per 100,000 across many countries. One outlier: USA; video game spending 45, fatalities 3.2/100.000.
If one looks at the scatterplot, it becomes obvious that it doesn’t make much sense to fit a linear model here and speak of a downward trend – there simply is no correlation, and that over a range of over 10 in video game spending.
One simplistic explanation less for people going postal. Amidst mourning and concern, this is actually good news.
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/shootinggraph-640x338.png
