Friday, December 21, 2012

Why Video Games Don't Correlate to Gun Violence - National - The Atlantic Wire


Video games have repeatedly been a scapegoat following tragedies like the one that occurred in Newtown. ABC News has already run a piece asking "Do Video Games Make Kids Violent?" CNN reported that they were cited among Adam Lanza's likes. But with a series of graphs in the Washington Post Max Fisher makes a compelling case that countries with more video games don't have more gun violence. With gun-related murders and video game consumption plotted on a graph, you can see that the United States has a high rate of murders but, compared to somewhere like the Netherlands, a relatively low rate of video game spending per capita. Fisher shows that the trend line for the graph actually has a downward slope, meaning more video games do not mean more gun violence. The graph also goes on to show how much of an outlier the United States is when it comes to gun-related murders. Click through to read more of his analysis

---SPSmith

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