Bowling for Columbine is a documentary film by Michael Moore. It opened October 11, 2002.
Taking the Columbine High School massacre as a starting point, the film is an exploration of the nature of violence in the United States consisting of clips from gun advertisements, satirical animations about North American history and Moore's discussions with various people, including Charlton Heston and Marilyn Manson. Moore seeks to answer, in his own unique, muckraking style, the questions of why the Columbine massacre occurred, and why the United States is more violent than other democratic states, including, in particular, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom. In the end, he comes to no clear answers, though he apparently believes it has something to do with the combination of Americans living in an unreasonable amount of fear and Americans having and introducing so many guns into such a volatile environment.
Moore's only attempt at statistically supporting the claim that the United States is more violent than other countries is a comparison of the total number of gun deaths per year in the countries mentioned above. In this sequence, the United States does have the highest number by a significant margin. Moore makes the common mistake of not correcting these numbers for the population of the countries compared, a mistake which does not, however, impair his conclusion. Correcting Moore's numbers with the population figures from the CIA World FactBook 2002, the following statistics can be calculated. A person's chance of being murdered by a gun in the U.S. is - 7.7 times more than in Canada; 8.7 times more than in Germany; 9.3 times more than in France; 11.9 times more than in Australia; 35 times more than in UK and 129 times more than in Japan.
Moore has been criticized for playing fast and loose with the facts and staging some scenes.
See also: Roger & Me
External Links
- New York Times review
- The United Nations International Study on Firearm Regulation has country-by-country statistics about both gun ownership rates and death by firearm rates.
- The official Bowling For Columbine FAQ
- Factual errors and staged scenes in Bowling for Columbine from spinsanity.org
- The title is wrong, the shooters did not go bowling that morning from Forbes Magazine