The truth !

[Double Naught Spy]

Statistics was never my major... that being said in each of the cases there are several variables, and several potential variables. So in cases like these you have to do an analysis of co-variation (actually several analyses). It's usually at that stage where false correlations show up and drop out.

I wasn't either, but I had 6 undergrad hours of it and 6 graduate hours of it. I hated every moment of it.

Right on the co-variables, but nobody knows enough about the shooters to have the information to do a proper statistical study. Sure, many played video games. Many played shooting video games. We could look at all of the successful people and see how many of them played video games such as shooting video games and would find that a huge percentage did as well.

What the statistics won't tell us is if video games are causative or not. It is that the shooters are predisposed to being drawn to and playing such games and later turned out to be shooters, or were these folks peace loving individual who were changed due to their exposure to the games?

The same issues happen with the medications studies. Most of these shooters were on pyschoactive medications or had been taken off psychoactive medications. So are the pyschoactive medications what is driving them to become shooters or were these people already very mentally troubled (hence having been prescribed the psychoactive drugs)? Of course, there are millions of people in the US population that have been on psychoactive drugs of some sort during their lives and many who are on them as part of a daily regiment and they never do anything terrible.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Statistical analysis fails to tell us.

It is easy to find simple correlations of behavior with numbers. It is hard to find causations when it comes to behavior. That usually falls into the realm of interpretation.