Impressions Re: Bowling For Columbine
by Scott D. DeSalvo
Last week I had the opportunity to see Michael Moore's excellent 'Bowling for Columbine,' a film that struck me in its marketing as being essentially an anti-gun movie. As a Second Amendment advocate and generally an advocate of freedom for law-abiding citizens, I was prepared to have an overwhelmingly negative reaction to the movie. With a negative preconception and box of popcorn in hand, I entered the theatre.
For nearly two hours, I was delighted by a well crafted and witty film focusing on many of the problems generally identified in modern America: Crime, Violence, Unemployment, Poverty, Welfare, Racism. The focus of the film is specifically gun violence, and in that context, the other issues are addressed. And while Mr. Moore does not explicitly state his political views, his choices in presenting the issues make it clear that he is fairly-typically liberal, in the modern sense.
Throughout the film, Mr. Moore explores why America suffers from such staggeringly high levels of gun deaths (in the thousands per year) when other nations suffer only hundreds per year, or less. To his credit, he does not take the easy road, as many anti-gun advocates do, in arguing that gun availability is the culprit. He rejects this explanation by comparing the United States with Canada, where there is approximately one gun privately owned for every four Canadian citizens, and yet Canadians suffer fewer than 100 gun-related deaths per year. He dismisses the excuse that America is a more violent country (virtually every other country in the world has as bloody and violent a history and present, and many, arguably, more so). He also debunks "ethnic diversity," "violence in media," and "poverty," as the culprit, since all of these things exist in equal or greater quantities in other countries that have much lower gun death rates.
Mr. Moore seems to settle on "fear" as the reason for gun violence in America. He crafts the argument that mass news media in the U.S. is constantly agitating the population to be afraid: afraid of different races and cultures, afraid of crime generally, afraid of other nations, afraid of our neighbors. This fear, evidently, creates great demand for guns and security devices, and somehow causes tragedies like Oklahoma City and Columbine. This mechanism is never explained. Moore himself identifies that this explanation is not ironclad. In fact, in a poignant moment in the film for me, he seems to dismiss the possibility of ever coming to understand why the United States is plagued with gun violence and death. Tongue-in-cheek, he suggests that perhaps bowling is as likely a cause of gun violence as any, since the young men responsible for the shootings at Columbine attended their Bowling class (a substitute for Physical Education classes) on the morning of that massacre.
After rejecting 'gun availability' in favor of 'fear' as a tenuous explanation for the gun violence rate, Mr. Moore's film take a bizarre turn: the last third of the film seems to be focused on advocating making guns and ammunition less-available. He brings two of the young men whose lives have been shattered by their injuries sustained at Columbine to the K-Mart national offices in Michigan, in an eventually successful attempt to get K-Mart Stores to stop selling ammunition at their stores. He advocates the idea that Michigan's Welfare-To-Work program is responsible for a 6-year old bringing a gun to school and shooting a little girl to death in his class (because the boy's mother was at work rather than at home when the boy went to school that day). Moore concludes the film when he surreptitiously obtains an interview with National Rifle Association President Charleton Heston, and confronts him with a picture of the little girl, as if Mr. Heston is somehow responsible for her death, or could have taken some action to prevent the tragedy.
I found the end of the movie to be a disappointment because it is typically anti-intellectual in orientation. It ignores its own conclusions, suspends any intellectual examination of the issues, and turn to emotions, employed as a sort of political battering ram, to advance liberal political agenda: pro-big government (ala Canada's welfare and free heath care programs), and anti-gun ownership. I was also disappointed that the film did not address other facets of the gun debate, such as the fact that, wherever concealed carry laws are enacted, the crime and murder rate drops, and the fact that criminals will always flout the law and obtain guns, whereas law abiding citizens will not be allowed to do so. The film is, if nothing else, a masterfully executed piece of political propaganda. In one well-crafted film, it advocates big government, a reduction in freedom for citizens' rights, an expansion of welfare and national heath care, a disdain for American history, and an anti-intellectual problem solving process.
The film must be praised for its technical merits and artistic achievement. But I take profound exception to the messages of the film. It is worth seeing, but leaves me with a strong desire to find an Objectivist filmmaker who can marshal intellectual arguments and emotion to present issues such as those addressed in this film in a more objective manner.
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