The Transport Guy: How Amazon gets away with not paying taxes

Alyssa Pagano and Steve Kovach April 26, 2018 at 11:55AM

Amazon pays almost no federal tax, despite being worth over $700 billion. President Trump has criticized the company for this, yet he recently reduced the corporate tax rate, making it even easier for large companies to pay less. Following is a transcript of the video. 

Steve Kovach: Amazon is the new favorite punching bag for conservatives.

Tucker Carlson: The company's tax payments are not keeping up with its great wealth— okay that's a profound understatement.

Kovach: Wait, not paying enough taxes? That doesn't sound too conservative to me. This sounds conservative.

George Bush: Read my lips, no new taxes.

Kovach: But attacking Amazon for its tax practices is the new conservative line today. That's mostly because President Trump has been attacking Amazon over and over again about how it pays taxes and he's been at it for years.

Donald Trump: Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise.

Kovach: But believe it or not, in some cases, Trump is right. Amazon's profits in 2017 were about $3 billion and it paid almost no federal taxes.

Bob Bryan: Amazon avoids paying federal taxes using a variety of tax credits and tax exemptions that are legal and built into the U.S. federal tax code. Some of these can include the research and development tax credit which allows them to deduct some of the costs of new investments and also a big one for this past year was the ability to deduct stock-based compensation of executives.

Kovach: Amazon does a really good job at avoiding federal taxes, and for most of its existence, it avoided charging you state sales tax, that's because Amazon used to take advantage of the Internet Tax Freedom Act which said online retailers didn't have to charge sales tax. It allowed Amazon and other retailers to sell tons of stuff to you effectively tax-free. By 2017, that all changed, Amazon started charging sales tax in all the states that have it, but it's not that simple, a lot of third-party sellers sell stuff through Amazon as well, and many of them don't charge sales tax.

Bryan: A lot of sites show that there are tens of millions of dollars every year in state sales tax that go uncollected from third-party sellers.

Kovach: Meanwhile, Amazon is looking for even more sweet tax deals. You've probably heard of HQ2, the new campus that it's trying to build somewhere in the United States, and cities are tripping over themselves to come up with new incentives to get Amazon to come into their town. New Jersey, for example, is offering $7 billion in tax breaks if Amazon builds its new campus somewhere around Newark, New Jersey. Those aren't the only tax deals Amazon has gotten. From 2005 to 2014, it's gotten over $600 million in tax breaks to build warehouses in certain states. It got another $147 million in tax breaks for building data centers around the country. Keep in mind Amazon is valued at over $700 billion, it's not like the company is struggling to save money. Amazon may be getting a lot of attention right now because of President Trump's attacks, but its tax practices aren't unique. A lot of big companies find ways to pay as little tax as possible.

Bryan: If you look at actually kinda the aggregate of the S&P 500, so the biggest 500 companies in the U.S., even though the old statutory tax rate was 35%, the average tax rate that was being paid last year was around 22%.

Kovach: The irony here, of course, is that even though President Trump loves to blast Amazon for the way it doesn't pay taxes, he's putting new laws that make that easier to happen. He just reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, oh and that applies to himself too.

Hillary Clinton: He didn't pay any federal income tax, so--

Donald Trump: That makes me smart.

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How Amazon gets away with not paying taxes from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: How a tiny camera startup is taking on Amazon and Google

Jen Atalla and Steve Kovach April 23, 2018 at 11:09AM

It's very difficult for startup companies to build hardware that can compete against large companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple. Wyze Labs' first product — the Wyze Cam — has many of the same features as Google’s Nest Cam for nearly 10% of the cost. Following is a transcript of the video.

Steve Kovach - The big thing about Wyze is it offers a lot of the features that you might see from competitors like Nest and Amazon and all those other companies but it's way cheaper, it's 20 bucks. How do you guys do that? How do you even make money on this thing?

Elana Fishman - Founding this company, what we really focused on was thinking about how do we democratize technology? So there were four of us that founded this together. Our background, we met when we were working at Amazon.

We bring a very customer-centric focus to smart home and we looked at the smart home industry and realized that a lot of the products out there weren't meeting customer needs. So either very expensive or unreliable and glitchy and just weren't meeting the expectations of customers and we thought we could do better.

Steve Kovach - So on paper, spec by spec, it seems very similar to these pricier cameras. Nest cameras have been around for years, your former employer Amazon has their own version and they also just bought Ring. Just walk me through the specs of what this can do and what the competition can do.

Elana Fishman - Yeah, we're basically on par with the other smart home cameras that are out there. It's a 1080p camera, very fast connection when you pull it up into the app, we have the ability to add an SD card which a lot of cameras don't and that way you can do continuous recording locally on the hardware and be able to access that through the app.

A lot of our competitors charge for the cloud storage, we don't, we offer free cloud storage for 14 days. So spec by spec, we're basically on par with our competitors. And for us, what we really think about is not trying to make money on any individual product but getting as many products out there because we really believe that this technology can help people and we want to get it in as many hands as possible.

Steve Kovach - The idea here is you guys can go to suppliers out in Asia and say, "This is what we want" and they can kind of whip it together. Talk about that process.

Elana Fishman - Sure, so for this particular product, we have a very strong relationship with our manufacturer in China. We're not just looking for suppliers, we're looking for partners that believe in our mission of creating quality products at affordable prices. We're looking for partners that are already producing at scale, so have expertise on the supply chain side. So we can leverage their economies of scale and offer products at awesome prices to our customers.

We sold 100,000 in our initial sale and sold out almost immediately and have been chasing inventory since then. We have a lot of people that bought one not really believing they could get a quality camera for $20 and then came back and bought more.

Steve Kovach - And what your team does is mostly they have the hardware side locked down and you guys come in and create the apps that people are using?

Elana Fishman - Yeah, so we focus very much on the user experience. So we create a unique app for our products but at the same time, we work with the manufacturer to improve the hardware. So we just launched the version two of the Wyze Cam, we just started shipping that this week and for that, we took feedback from our customers of how they liked the first version and then we worked with our manufacturer to improve primarily internal components to improve the image quality, the night vision and some different aspects of the chipset within the camera.

So we start with things that may be a little more off the shelf and fine tune them and upgraded them as we hear from our customers on what they want.

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How a tiny camera startup is taking on Amazon and Google from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: How does MoviePass make money?

Jen Atalla and Steve Kovach April 17, 2018 at 08:36AM

By now, most people have heard of MoviePass and its deal of a movie a day in theaters for the price of $9.95 per month. In fact, there are multiple subreddits  dedicated to MoviePass. Even elitist moviegoers forego referencing Rotten Tomatoes for movie recommendations now that MoviePass has made the theater experience financially accessible.

Users of MoviePass ask about limitations of the subscription service from restrictions on theater locations to whether or not users are allowed to see the same movie twice. There are actually few limitations of service which further poses the question, how does MoviePass make money?

Mitch Lowe, CEO of MoviePass, sat down with Senior Correspondent Steve Kovach to discuss the MoviePass business model and the many ways MoviePass turns a profit. Following is a transcript of the video.

Steve Kovach: It's a service that sounds too good to be true. MoviePass, you pay 10 bucks a month, and you can watch pretty much unlimited movies in theaters.

You lose money when I see one movie. How does this business model work out for you in the end?

Mitch Lowe: I always find it interesting that, to get that question, because, you know, Netflix has to borrow billions of dollars a year to stay in business; to create the content, that they don't earn enough money to pay for. If you read the reports about Spotify, they spent two billion dollars more on content than the revenue they generated. And we're no different.

We're building a big subscriber base of film lovers who, over time, we have dozens of ways to make money. For example, marketing on behalf of studios. The film distribution system is completely broken. It's so hard to get a film out in the theater that's not a big blockbuster hit. And there's hundreds of millions of dollars spent marketing those films. We're an incredibly effective partner for those studios. We have people who are coming to our site, you know, four and five times a week where we can sell advertising. And we're on our way to get to break-even on our subscription.

Steve Kovach: So right now, just the subscription part, you're essentially break-even, maybe sometimes a little bit profitable.

Mitch Lowe: We're not there yet. When you do kind of an all-you-can-eat subscription, the first people who join are people in New York, people who go, "Geez, it's a no-brainer. I'm spending $15 on a ticket. This is $10, I'm gonna save money on my first ticket." Or they're the 11% of moviegoers who already go to 18 films a year. Over time, slowly but surely, you start to acquire more of the casual moviegoers. This is why we priced it at $9.95. So where 89% of film-goers, over 200 million people, only see four movies year. And they spend $40 to $60 a year on movie tickets. When they join MoviePass, now they're spending $120. We're increasing their consumption and they'll do it because it's $9.95 and it's an unlimited value for them.

Steve Kovach: So the hope is, it's kind of like the gym membership model, that maybe some of these people won't actually go to as many movies, and they'll, kind of, make up for the people who are going every day. Is that how you're thinking about it?

Mitch Lowe: Not quite. What it ends up is, if you look at the distribution between the casual moviegoer who now is going about 10, 11 times a year. That's roughly what, they're spending $9.95 and they're going a little bit less than one a month. They're kind of breaking even on it. And we add all these other values, like special screenings that are only for MoviePass subscribers. We're going to bring back some of the classics into the big screen that, you know, people haven't seen on the big screen ever, that will be exclusive for MoviePass subscribers.

Steve Kovach: So you're big pitch, is we have well over two million subscribers now, we should easily get to five by the end of the year, it's just going to grow from there. We're going to juice those numbers a little bit by offering these deals once every few weeks. Then you go to marketers and say, what can we do, how can we work with you? How can you pay us to access these people?

Mitch Lowe: Exactly, and our subscribers are so thrilled with the value they are getting, that they're very open to recommendations.

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How does MoviePass make money? from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: Face-swapping videos could lead to more 'fake news'

Kevin Reilly and Steve Kovach April 13, 2018 at 12:14PM

Fake news has been a problem swamping the internet. Now there is a way to make fake videos with nothing more than your laptop. FakeApp can be used to make fake videos of people using images or other videos of them. Several social media platforms are filled with these deepfakes. While the technology still needs works, it's been used to put celebrities into pornographic films. What would happen if world leaders became digital puppets? Following is a full transcript of the video. 

Steve Kovach: You've probably seen this Snapchat filter before. It's called Face Swap. It's an augmented reality feature that takes someone else's face and puts it on your own. But it turns out this fun technology is becoming easy for anyone to use. And not just in Snapchat.

This is called a deepfake. They're shockingly easy to make. And for the most part, people use them to make goofy videos. But there's a darker side to this. It used to be you had to be a world-class film editor to get this effect. But now anyone can do it with just a simple app. FakeApp is a free PC program based on Google's opensourced machine learning technology. Since it's opensourced, anyone can have access to this technology to make fake videos. Think of it as an advanced version of their Snapchat lenses. You feed the program hundreds or thousands of images, and it spits out a fake video.

Deepfakes have already started spreading through many online communities. Most are harmless, but they have crept into the darker parts of the internet too. Of course, a lot of these are silly and goofy. This deepfake shows Nicholas Cage as Lois Lane in a Superman movie. But some have used it for malicious reasons. Like taking celebrity images and putting them in pornographic videos. Gal Gadot and Taylor Swift were some of the many victims of this trend. Twitter, Reddit, and some adult sites have already promised to ban deepfake videos. But the problem doesn't end there. Some are worried that as technology gets better, it can be used to spread hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and fake news online.

Senator Mark Warner: The next wave of technology will be able to have your image with words coming out of your mouth that may not be said, or your face put on somebody else's body in terms of next wave of technology.

Kovach: Could you imagine making a digital puppet out of Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, or Vladimir Putin? Researchers at Stanford University already did this. Imagine someone making a video like that to make a world leader declare war on another country. It's a scary proposition. In the digital age, we've even seen governments use tools like Photoshop to spread propaganda, and with deepfake videos, it's going to take the problem to a whole new level. Social networks are designed to promote content with shock value and shareability. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have done little to prove that they can handle fake news.

Anchor: Facebook is the most important mechanism facilitating the spread of fake news.

Anchor: Facebook just allows us to quantify that more. How real do you think the fake news problem is?

Guest:  It's a real problem.

Anchor: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today finally speaking out. Admitting mistakes and vowing to correct them.

Kovach: But if they already have a problem weeding out fake news articles, how are they going to handle fake news videos? Congress hasn't shown that it's willing to regulate the tech industry, and it's unlikely someone else will come in and fix it before the problem gets worse.

The best advice to avoid deepfake hoaxes is the same advice to avoid all fake news and conspiracy theories. Stick to trusted news sources, that you know deliver reliable information. For now, deepfake technology isn't that great. But we should focus on it today, because tomorrow this could look pretty real.

President Trump: Eight billion. Net worth, not assests, not liabili--, a net worth.

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Face-swapping videos could lead to more 'fake news' from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: Facebook has gotten so big that no one can understand it, and it could be a good reason to break it up (FB)

Steve Kovach April 11, 2018 at 04:00PM

• Facebook has gotten so big that it's impossible to understand how it all works.
• Congress' concerns over data privacy are valid, but many missed a larger, deeper issue.
• More lawmakers should be asking if Facebook is getting too big and if it should be broken up.

---

When I load my Facebook News Feed right now, I see a picture of my nephew, an ad for a conference I'm speaking at next month, and a post from an old high school friend asking for recommendations for a new housekeeper. Your News Feed likely looks a lot different. Maybe it's a news article your friend shared. Or a political meme. Or a fundraiser for a charity your uncle is donating to for his birthday. 

The point is, there's no unified version of Facebook. Every new Facebook product, new update, and new algorithm adjustment is designed to make your experience better and ensure you're spending time connected to some Facebook-owned property, instead of anything else. Facebook is uniquely personal to you and the way you use it, and there are 2 billion different versions of it, one for each of its active users. That's not to mention the network of stuff outside the core app that the company owns, like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

That's the best explanation for many of the weak questions Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced during his two-day marathon of congressional hearings. It's easy to say the members of Congress who grilled Zuckerberg were old and out of touch with technology: They asked basic questions about Facebook's business that let him coast through each session. Incidentally, his net worth soared by $3 billion over the course of the hearings as the company's stock skyrocketed.

But as a 32-year-old who grew up around technology and covers the industry every day, even I don't fully understand how Facebook works. And many of my fellow journalists struggled to get Zuckerberg to break script during his marathon media tour over the last few weeks.

And that's what makes the Facebook Problem so difficult to solve. This week's hearings proved that no one has a full grasp of what Facebook actually is. 

Is it a tech company? A communication tool? A media company? A drone-based internet service provider? A financial institution? A virtual reality gaming company? Fertile ground for abuse, harassment, and election meddling?

The answer to all of the above is: "Yes."

Not even Zuckerberg could adequately define what Facebook is. (He defaulted to "tech company" but admitted Facebook has a responsibility to the parts of business that touch the media, privacy, and safety.) It's impossible to define Facebook because Facebook is everything.

And that leads us to larger issues.

Is Facebook a monopoly?

There's been a lot of talk about regulating the tech industry this week. Those are good conversations to have, especially when it comes to digital privacy standards that will shape the way online companies manage their users' data for decades to come. The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect next month, seems like a good place to start. Facebook and the rest of the Big Tech platforms have already made it clear they're not equipped to handle privacy issues on their own.

But there are deeper questions surrounding Facebook, one that only a few of the dozens of members of Congress who grilled Zuckerberg touched on during the hearings this week. Should a company that offers so much, a company that strives to be everything to everyone, be broken up? Is it a monopoly today? Is it at risk of becoming one soon?

Zuckerberg choked whenever the issue came up. He pointed to the fact that Facebook has many competitors, but didn't mention them by name. He also threw out a stat that the average American uses eight apps every day.

Guess what? Facebook owns a lot of those apps.

If you open the US App Store right now on your iPhone, you'll see that three of the top 10 free apps are owned by Facebook: Instagram, Messenger, and the core Facebook app. WhatsApp is number 12. It's a similar story on Android. And don't forget Facebook tried to buy Snapchat, another top app, for $3 billion back in 2013.

Does that seem like a healthy, competitive social app ecosystem to you?

There are numerous other concerns, like Facebook using its wealth to connect users in developing countries for the internet for the first time. Those projects have noble intentions, but also ensure that the first version of the internet people experience is Facebook's version of the internet.

This week was just the beginning for Big Tech and its reckoning with lawmakers in DC. It got everyone thinking and talking about privacy standards and what the government's role in crafting those standards should be. It's not moving fast enough. But it is a start.

In the meantime, Facebook is only going to get bigger and more powerful. Same with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Moving beyond privacy, beyond election meddling, and beyond fake news is something more important. How big should these giants get? And what should the scope of their power look like?

It's worth talking about now before it's too late.

SEE ALSO: Dropbox CEO talks about how he went from rejecting Steve Jobs to an $11 billion IPO

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NOW WATCH: FACEBOOK COFOUNDER: How I negotiated with Mark Zuckerberg for a $500 million stake

Facebook has gotten so big that no one can understand it, and it could be a good reason to break it up (FB) from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: Why Apple makes it so hard to get a new iPhone battery

Kevin Reilly and Steve Kovach April 11, 2018 at 11:18AM

Apple recently announced that it was intentionally slowing down older iPhone models in order to preserve battery life. This had been a long-standing conspiracy theory floating around the internet. Apple lowered its battery replacement fee to $29 in response. However, many people have found it difficult to get Apple to change their batteries. We went to an Apple store to see what would happen when we tried to have the battery on an iPhone 6 replaced. Apple recommended that we keep the original battery. Following is a transcript of the video.

Steve Kovach: Has this ever happened to you? What about this?

That could be because your iPhone battery is old. Luckily, you can swap it out for a new one for just $29 and that will solve most of your problems. But Apple doesn't always make it easy.

Apple and other smartphone makers use a technology called lithium ion for their batteries. It's the best kind of battery for mobile devices, but it gets a little worse over time. After two years or so, your iPhone battery can only hold about 80% of its original charge. Apple decided to manage this problem by intentionally slowing down older iPhones so they would draw less power and avoid random shutdowns. But there was one problem, Apple never told anyone it was doing this. So while users noticed better battery life, they also noticed worse performance.

This has been a longstanding conspiracy theory about iPhones. Apple intentionally slows it down to encourage you to buy a new one. And it turns out, that conspiracy theory was mostly true. A site called Geekbench noticed that some older iPhone models were running slower than they should be. Apple finally admitted to what it was doing and apologized. It also changed its battery replacement program, dropping the price from $79 to just $29. But it's not that simple.

Since Apple announced its new battery replacement program, customers have complained that they've gone to get their batteries tested and Apple tells them everything is fine. My colleague Jen was having issues with her iPhone 6 battery life, so we made an appointment at an Apple Store here in New York City.

Employee: So as far as the battery goes, it's able to hold 93% of its charged capacity. Now that's all fine and good. I can tell you that the top two reasons why the phone would turn off is either battery or full storage.

Kovach: So why was she having bad battery life? In Jen's case, Apple said it was likely due to the fact that she was using up most of the storage on her iPhone.

Employee: My advice, don't worry about the battery. You got the phone in July of 2017, that battery should be fine. The issue that you're having is strictly an issue with storage.

Kovach: Okay, great.

After that visit, Apple added a new feature to iOS that lets users check the health of their batteries on their own phones. We tried it and got a slightly better reading. 

When we went back to the Apple Store, they said some apps were running in the background, causing the battery to drain faster. They suggested deleting those apps and redownloading them. 

This is another problem. Apple's battery tests may say everything is fine, but that doesn't show up in what the user is experiencing. Between those two visits, Apple Geniuses couldn't pinpoint the exact cause.

The good news, Apple told Jen she could still get her battery replaced for just $29. The bad news, she'd have to wait several weeks for that battery replacement to come in.

It's in Apple's best interest to make sure customers are upgrading to new $700 iPhones instead of extending the life of their current devices with a new $29 battery. About 2/3 of Apple's revenue comes from iPhone sales and Wall Street judges the company on how many iPhones it sells each quarter. On top of this, Apple has been giving customers fewer reasons to upgrade the iPhone each year. New iPhone models have looked the same pretty much since 2014 and the iPhone 8 doesn't have a lot in there to convince people to upgrade from the iPhone 7. And the iPhone X's $1000 price tag has turned a lot of people off from upgrading.

Even though this process sounds annoying, it's actually better than a lot of Apple's competitors. Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and several other companies have said they don't intentionally slow down their devices to preserve battery life but they also don't make it easy to replace it. It's not like there's a Samsung store you can walk into and get your battery replaced. You have to mail it in.

I used to tell people to upgrade their iPhone every two years or so. But with this battery replacement program, you can extend the life by another two years. My advice? If you're having bad battery life and performance, go into the Apple Store, pay that $29, get a new battery and you'll feel like you have a brand new iPhone.

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Why Apple makes it so hard to get a new iPhone battery from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: Stop blaming violent video games for mass shootings

David Anderson and Steve Kovach April 09, 2018 at 09:00PM

Violent video games are played all over the world but mass shootings are an American problem. So why have video games been getting the blame? Following is a transcript of the video.

Joe Lieberman: "This game encourages players to shoot this gun..."

Donald Trump: "I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts."

LT. COL. (RET) Dave Grossman: "There's a clear unequivocal link between violent video games and violent behavior"

Steve Kovach: Actually... no. That's fake news. We need to stop blaming violent video games for mass shootings. Violent video games are played all over the world but mass shootings are a uniquely American problem. So why have video games been getting the blame for the last 20 years?

Patrick Markey: "We go through this thing called a moral panic..."

Steve Kovach: This is Patrick Markey, a professor at Villanova. He literally wrote the book on violence and video games.

Patrick Markey: Typically the older generation is fearful of something a younger generation is adopting that they don't totally understand or they don't see value in."

Chris Christie: "All you’re focusing on right now is gun control. What about the violence in our video games?”

Steve Kovach: That soundbite came shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2013. And it's happening again now as students continue to fight for more gun control in the wake of the shooting in Parkland, Florida. President Trump even held a meeting with top video game industry executives on the issue. This is how he opened up the meeting. Gross, right?
But as unsettling as those images are, there's no link between violent games and real-world violence.

Patrick Markey: When we look at games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, the two games tend to be kind of lightning rods and are often blamed for school shootings. We find that when those games first come out there's actually sudden dips in homicides in the United States. We've also done other things on when are people actually playing violent video games, this is kind of across the board, any type of violent video game and what we find is when people are playing violent video games we also see dips in violent crime: aggravated assaults, homicides and so forth."

Steve Kovach: By the way, we fixed the problem of easy access to violent video games decades ago. Remember this guy? That's former Senator Joe Lieberman in 1993. He really hated violent games, and he pushed for game makers to do something about it.

The ESRB formed, and video games would receive age-appropriate ratings. The ESRB was born in 1994 to do just that. And guess what? It's worked out pretty well. According to the ESRB, about 80% of physical retailers and over 90% of online retailers comply with ratings.

They test the effectiveness by sending secret underage shoppers into stores to buy games rated Mature. That means it's nearly impossible for a child under 17 to walk into a store and buy the latest Call of Duty game, or any other Mature title. They can only play these games if their parents buy it for them.

But what about all those killers? Why do we keep hearing they play video games? That's because the demographics of shooters usually lines up with the demographics of video gamers: Young and male.

Patrick Markey: "In fact, again, what is found in both studies is about 20% of school shooters showed interest in violent video games. Whereas the average high school student is about 70%. So what we find is the actual reality is the reverse of what we tend to think, that the school shooters tend to play less violent video games than the average high school student."

Steve Kovach: Of course, there's going to be a strong chance a shooter also played a lot of games. So do millions of other young males. Now, look at Steven Paddock, the man who committed the largest mass shooting in the country's history. He was 64 years old — not even close to the demographic that plays games. As journalists and investigators hunted for Paddock's motivation, video games never came up.

It's the same with other horrible shootings in recent history. Many of these shooters don't match the gamer profile.
They don't fit the narrative of a young, disaffected youth addicted to violent video games, so it was never brought up as a motivation.

Just because young males tend to play video games and also tend to be the ones who commit mass shootings, doesn't mean the two are linked. It's like saying all shooters wear sneakers, therefore sneakers cause gun violence.
So the video game industry makes it difficult for young people to access violent games. There's no correlation between violence and video games.

But what's it like in other countries where these games are played? And what does gun violence look like there?
Japan is a great example. Video games are deeply ingrained in the culture, and they're often more violent or perverted than what you find in the US. Guess how many gun deaths there are in Japan? Fewer than 10 most years. In a country of about 127 million.

There's only one common factor in every mass shooting. It's not video games. It's not exposure to violent movies. It's easy access to a gun.

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Stop blaming violent video games for mass shootings from Business Insider: Steve Kovach