“Bowling for Columbine” Misframes Gun Quandary

“Bowling for Columbine” Misframes Gun Quandary
By Mike Males, 11/6/02

            It’s hard to imagine a message more thoroughly muddled than Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine.” The film’s humor, colorful interviews, indignant arraignments of corporations and right-wing gun nuts, and favorable audience reception all raise the troubling question as to why progressive thinking on gun violence issue remains so confused.
            Moore begins with the right question--why do Americans kill each other with guns at rates staggeringly higher than any other affluent society? He then invites us to dissect the issue logically. Popular hokum masquerading as explanation doesn’t cut it.
            Is it America’s violent history? No. Germany, the UK, Japan, and other Western nations with minuscule gun-murder rates have bloody histories as well.
            Violent games and movies? No. Other rich nations sop up blood-soaked entertainment.
            Alienated kids? No shortage of those in less homicidal cultures.
            Poverty? No, Moore says, confusing unemployment with poverty. Canadian and UK unemployment rates are higher than the US’s.
            America’s guns? No.Canadians own plenty of guns and can buy bullets by the truckload.
            Racial diversity? No, Moore says; Canada is also multiethnic.
            Moore’s statistics are absurdly misleading. The U.S. is far more gun-infested (three times more guns, and eight times more handguns, per person than Canada), impoverished (poverty rates two to five times higher than Canada’s, especially for extreme and concentrated poverty) and diverse (blacks and Hispanics comprise 26% of the U.S. population compared to 2% of Canada’s, most of whose minorities are more affluent Asians with low murder rates). [...]
            What is this movie trying to say? On one level, complete nonsense. Moore presents white people’s fear of blacks and Hispanics, and consequent orgy of suburban gun-buying, as the cause of gun violence. He interviews the Flint, Michigan, District Attorney, who claims with a straight face that inner-city gun violence is not the problem; the problem is white suburban teens with guns. Moore lets him get away with reinforcing this liberal copout that both evades uncomfortable socioeconomic realities and reveals the extent to which white, upper-class politicians only get concerned when white people die.
            Moore and the DA forgot to consult Flint area vital statistics, which show 25 times more black inner-city teens than white suburban teens murdered by gunfire. Can’t get white folks concerned about that. Moore’s film follows the standard media rule: Gun killings are only important when they have white victims. Columbine’s school gun massacre is chosen as the focus not because it is a common or watershed event (gun massacres are common in America, but white school shootings are extremely rare), but because its victims were suburban.
Commenting on this conundrum, Moore contradicts himself again with a bizarrely racist comment. “Ninety percent of the guns in this country are bought out in the white suburbs where you don’t need them because there’s virtually no crime,” he told Phil Donahue (MSBNBC, 10/28). “And as the prosecutor says in the film, these guns then are stolen from the white communities and end up back in the inner city, creating all this violence.”
            Moore claims the problem is that low-crime white people let guns get into the hands of violent black people? Imagine the liberal outrage if Rush Limbaugh said that!
Having told fawning Donahue the suburbs have “virtually no crime,” Moore reverses himself yet again, telling fawning Oprah (ABC, 11/8/02) that the result of all the suburban gun-buying is that “the majority of murders” are “between white people.” Not even nearly. The latest, 2000 figures from the National Center for Health Statistics show that of 10,801 gun homicides in the U.S., 2,900 (a little more than one-fourth) involved whites; seven in 10 involved blacks and Latinos.
            While demanding that conservative gun-rights groups and corporations honestly soul-search their self-serving illogic, Moore walks away from points that are difficult for liberals and leftists. Blacks, 12% of the population, suffer 52% of the nation’s gun homicide deaths--a rate 11 times higher than whites’. Nine in 10 murdered blacks are shot by other blacks, not by whites.
            Moore’s orgy of self-contradiction concerns a political problem facing liberals in general: blacks and Hispanics really do commit and suffer gun violence at far higher levels than do more affluent whites. Further, it is not whites shooting minorities but, as Tupac Shakur lamented, “It’s my own kind doing all the killing here.” Poorer whites also have high gun murder rates; one’s odds of dying by gunfire rise sharply in almost perfect syncopation with one’s poverty level. Instead of confronting these stark realities, Moore trivializes black and Hispanic gun violence as figments of white paranoia.
            Is racism justified, then? Are whites right to arm themselves in fear of poorer gun-toters? No, as Moore’s walking tour of southcentral Los Angeles to counter media fear-mongering about black killers symbolically demonstrates. Of course L.A., even its most supposedly dangerous neighborhoods, is safer for whites than they believe. Nearly all of the relatively small number of murdered whites (84 murder victims in 2,000, in L.A.’s white population of 3 million) were slain by their own relatives, neighbors, and acquaintences.
            Meanwhile, LA’s scourge of black gun homicide (308 murder victims in a population of 900,000) is 12 times that of whites, and 100 times higher in Southcentral than among LA’s suburban whites. Moore not only fails to mention this awful fact, but--in a film supposedly concerned with gun violence--he jokes about police responding to a gun incident that occurs right on the street where he is filming.
Still, American whites, hardly poor as a group, suffer gun murder levels 2.5 times higher than Canadian citizens. What is America’s problem? (We might as well blame bowling, Moore says. The Columbine student gunboys rolled a few frames before shooting up their school.)
            Again and again, Moore wrecks his message with grandstanding. He confronts Kmart managers with Columbine students seeking to return store merchandise, the bullets lodged in their bodies. He wins a store promise to phase out ammunition sales. Liberals cheer. So what? Wal-Marts in peaceable Canada sell bullets by the ton, as Moore himself demonstrated.
            Moore badgers impresario Dick Clark for owning restaurants that hire welfare-to-work program recipients at low wage. More audience applause, but why? Moore earlier claimed poverty and unemployment don’t cause American’s gun carnage. And why hound an ignorant celebrity when he could have gotten better answers by calling out Michigan’s welfare director?
            Later, Moore interrogates National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston over gun proliferation. Enthusiastic audience hosannas, but to what purpose? Moore admits Canadians also own lots of guns but don’t perpetrate our level of slaughter. And if he wanted answers, the NRA’s legislative director would be the one to grill.
            Moore includes a lengthy roster of America’s use of military violence. What is his point? He admits gun-free European nations have similarly bloody records.
Is “Bowling” an incisive documentary, or just crowd-pleasers staged for liberals?
            Moore’s disingenuous confusion hijacks “Bowling” completely when he highlights the murder of the white 6 year-old Michigan girl by a first-grade black boy. Moore assigns blame to the poverty of the shooter’s mother caused by (a) auto industry plant shutdowns that created chronic unemployment, and (b) Michigan’s harsh welfare-to-work mandate that forced the mother to work long hours at low-paying jobs, resulting in time away from mothering and eviction from their home. But Moore earlier dismissed unemployment and poverty as factors causing American gun violence--a standard liberal subterfuge that completely undermines his best point.
            However, “Bowling” does reveal two uniquely American traits that may explain our gun carnage: Americans fear each other intensely and are indifferent to their fellow citizens’ well being. Those directly affected by a gun tragedy are the only ones who care about it. Others are detached, motivated by political opportunism, media ratings, and commercial interest. Moore’s otherwise pointless interview with Heston accuses him mainly of insensitivity: the NRA staged rallies in Colorado and Michigan following local gun tragedies. Was bad manners really the sin?
            Perhaps so. American’s callousness to fellow citizens’ suffering, revealed countless times in and by “Bowling,” is a key point. Canadians seem concerned about the welfare of other Canadians and willing to translate that empathy into generous social programs and trusting attitudes that don’t hold their fellow citizens in poverty and suspicion. Americans fear and suspect other Americans. We reject common responsibility out of the assumption that our own countrymen would freeload. We buy guns for protection from each other and wind up shooting the people around us in vastly outsized numbers.
            But why are Americans, inhabitants of the same country with shared interests, so extraordinarily indifferent and fearful toward one another? This callousness is shown in Michigan’s welfare system, NRA rallying at tragedy sites, the phony press and politician exploitation of firearms murders, and the Flint District Attorney’s and Moore’s own indifference to inner city gun violence. “Bowling” demonstrates the extent to which Americans obsess over trivial symbols and rigid ideologies to evade fundamental issues of state-generated inequality and the violence it engenders. Of course, had Moore pursued the tough socioeconomic issues instead of clichéd liberal nemeses, he wouldn’t have a film screening in 700 theaters.

Mike Males teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has written four books on youth issues.
Email mmales@earthlink.net   Homepage http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales

Moore’s orgy of self-contradiction concerns a political problem facing liberals in general: blacks and Hispanics really do commit and suffer gun violence at far higher levels than do more affluent whites. Further, it is not whites shooting minorities but, as Tupac Shakur lamented, “It’s my own kind doing all the killing here.” Poorer whites also have high gun murder rates; one’s odds of dying by gunfire rise sharply in almost perfect syncopation with one’s poverty level. Instead of confronting these stark realities, Moore trivializes black and Hispanic gun violence as figments of white paranoia.

This involves a massive confusion of cause and effect. The same factors which make for poverty tend to make for more lawlessness. It is not poverty which causes lawlessness, but poverty and lawlessness have some roots in common.

However, the still more interesting and obviously neglected factor, here, is that the Black crime rate has borne a proportionate relationship to the extent of liberalism in any community--i.e., the Black to White per capita crime rate is directly proportionate to the extent a community accepts "Liberal" premises. And this has been true since the early 1900s. For example in the immediate post World War II era, the ratio was about 3 to 1 in most of the South, but only 1 to l in South Carolina. In the more Conservative Northern States it was about 5 to 1. In New York and Massachusetts, it was about 8 to 1. By 1960, in the most "Liberal" States, it had risen to 12 to 1, as the "Liberal" excesses became more pronounced. It was still, however, about 1 to 1 in South Carolina!

It is not "poverty," but "Liberalism" which breeds crime. It is also the chief cause for poverty. Why? Its denial of human reality saps the incentive to succeed at anything. Its provision of crutches for failure promotes failure.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

Moore contradicts himself again with a bizarrely racist comment. “Ninety percent of the guns in this country are bought out in the white suburbs where you don’t need them because there’s virtually no crime,” he told Phil Donahue (MSBNBC, 10/28). “And as the prosecutor says in the film, these guns then are stolen from the white communities and end up back in the inner city, creating all this violence.”

Moore is a racist. As Moore points out: 60% of the murders are committed by a very small group of people who are located in a very small geographic area, which is less than 2% of the land area. That means that the remaining 40% of the murders are spread out in the rest of 98% of America. This 98% of America is among lowest crime/murder rate in the world.

Moore has no answers, just contradictory questions.

When you consider that North Dakota has the lowest murder rate of any country in the world, then any national gun control law would be pointless, a waste of resources, waste of time,waste of police, etc.

Whatever needs to be done to get the murder rate down in the 2% of America which does have a high murder rate, it must be localized, it must directed soley to that 2% geographical area.

A major theme in Bowling for Columbine
is that NRA is callous toward slayings. In order to make this theme fit the facts, however, Bowling repeatedly distorts the evidence. It portrays this with the following sequence: Weeping children outside Columbine;
And then a Cut to Charlton Heston holding a musket and proclaiming "I have only five words for you: 'from my cold, dead, hands'";

*The Fact is: Heston's "cold dead hands" speech, which leads off Moore's depiction of the Denver meeting, was not given at Denver after Columbine. It was given a year later in Charlotte, North Carolina, and was his gesture of gratitude upon his being given a handmade musket, at that annual meeting.

Moore has actually taken audio of seven sentences, from five different parts of the speech, and a section given in a different speech entirely, and spliced them together. Each edit is cleverly covered by inserting a still or video footage for a few seconds.
First, right after the weeping victims, Moore puts on Heston's "I have only five words for you . . . cold dead hands" statement, making it seem directed at them. As noted above, it's actually a thank-you speech given a year later in North Carolina.
Moore then has an interlude -- a visual of a billboard and his narration. This is vital. He can't go directly to Heston's real Denver speech. If he did that, you might ask why Heston in mid-speech changed from a purple tie and lavender shirt to a white shirt and red tie, and the background draperies went from maroon to blue. Moore has to separate the two segments.
Moore's second edit (covered by splicing in a pan shot of the crowd) deletes Heston's announcement that NRA has in fact cancelled most of its meeting:
"As you know, we've cancelled the festivities, the fellowship we normally enjoy at our annual gatherings. This decision has perplexed a few and inconvenienced thousands. As your president, I apologize for that."
Moore then cuts to Heston noting that Denver's mayor asked NRA not to come, and shows Heston replying "I said to the Mayor: As Americans, we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land. Don't come here? We're already here!" as if in defiance.
**Actually, Moore put an edit right in the middle of the first sentence, and another at its end! Heston really said (with reference his own WWII vet status) "I said to the mayor, well, my reply to the mayor is, I volunteered for the war they wanted me to attend when I was 18 years old. Since then, I've run small errands for my country, from Nigeria to Vietnam. I know many of you here in this room could say the same thing."
Moore cuts it after "I said to the Mayor" and attaches a sentence from the end of the next paragraph: "As Americans, we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land." He hides the deletion by cutting to footage of protestors and a photo of the Mayor before going back and showing Heston.
Moore has Heston then triumphantly announce "Don't come here? We're already here!" Actually, that sentence is clipped from a segment five paragraphs farther on in the speech. Again, Moore uses an editing trick to cover the doctoring, switching to a pan shot of the audience as Heston's (edited) voice would continues…

Moore is a “two bit switch and hit liar” that’s out to remove our rights too own a gun. Moore is a propaganda “mouth piece” for the extreme left-wing movement of the so-called democratic Party. < Case in point> In an animated history send-up, with the narrator talking rapidly, Bowling equates the NRA with the Klan, suggesting NRA was founded in 1871, "the same year that the Klan became an illegal terrorist organization." Bowling goes on to depict Klansmen becoming the NRA and an NRA character helping to light a burning cross.

This sequence is intended to create the impression either that NRA and the Klan were parallel groups or that when the Klan was outlawed its members formed the NRA.
Both impressions are not merely false, but directly opposed to the real facts.

Fact: The NRA was founded in 1871 -- by act of the New York Legislature, at request of former Union officers. The Klan was founded in 1866, and quickly became a terrorist organization. One might claim that while it was an organization and a terrorist one, it technically became an "illegal" such with passage of the federal Ku Klux Klan Act and Enforcement Act in 1871. These criminalized interference with civil rights, and empowered the President to use troops to suppress the Klan. (Although we'd have to acknowledge that murder, terror and arson were illegal long before that time -- the Klan hadn't been operating legally until 1871, it was operating illegally with the connivance of law enforcement.)

Fact: The Klan Act and Enforcement Act were signed into law by President Ulysess S. Grant. Grant used their provisions vigorously, suspending habeas corpus and deploying troops; under his leadership over 5,000 arrests were made and the Klan was dealt a serious (if all too short-lived) blow.
Fact: Grant's vigor in disrupting the Klan earned him unpopularity among many whites, but Frederick Douglass praised him, and an associate of Douglass wrote that African-Americans "will ever cherish a grateful remembrance of his name, fame and great services."
Fact: After Grant left the White House, the NRA elected him as its eighth president.
Fact: After Grant's term, the NRA elected General Philip Sheridan, who had removed the governor Lousiana for failure to suppress the KKK.
Fact: The affinity of NRA for enemies of the Klan is hardly surprising. The NRA was founded by former Union officers, and eight of its first ten presidents were Union veterans.
Fact: During the 1950s and 1960s, groups of blacks organized as NRA chapters in order to obtain surplus military rifles to fight off Klansmen.

-I Think the time has come where Moore should open his eyes or retire from his post of being the Minster of propaganda-

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