My first instinct when watching Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, a film on what he calls the whole gun issue, was to sit down and dissect the various issues he points out - both were I agree with him and where I don't. I passed on the idea, but I'd still like to put in a comment or two about it.
Everything a human makes is biased, tinted by their own perception of the world. The very least you can do is present your biases up front and not try to hide behind a façade of mock impartiality. Moore repeatedly hides his, pointing out how he's a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association, just before attempting to stealthily paintball the NRA as insensitive and partly at fault for the state of the U.S. society. Pretty much like if you had me calling myself a libertarian but demanding tighter immigration controls, the Government micromanaging our lives and less personal privacy for safety's sake.
But still, the film plods on. You've heard the joke about lies, damn lies and statistics. Moore pulls some of those last on his film, pointing out that the number of gun slayings in the United States is larger than the one in England or Japan, for instance. He conveniently leaves out the fact that in England about 7 out of 10 baseball bats that are purchased end up being used to beat up or kill somebody; or that in Japan kids don't come to school with guns - they climb on a bus with a kitchen knife and start stabbing people.
The saddest thing is that for a moment, he seems to be on the right track. Near the middle of the movie he stops all the "guns are bad, why keep guns loaded around the house" blah-blah and goes to Canada, a country where - unlike England or Japan - people are allowed to buy guns and keep them in their homes, and they do. Some of those interviewed have hand guns, rifles, shotguns, everything short of Howitzers at the house, and yet they don't one day come out one afternoon and shoot the block to Kingdom come. The same case could have been made for Israel or Switzerland, where people are armed to the teeth, but let's just say that Canada is culturally closer to the U.S.
Why is that difference? It is obvious that the problem is not gun availability, since that is not a factor on those countries. There's an inescapable fact that even Moore momentarily acknowledges: the problem must lie in society itself.
Merely a few minutes later he's saying that on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, something was clear to him: "a society this scared shouldn't have that many guns lying around".
And off he goes again down the guns-are-the-actual-problem slide.
I've tried to figure out why that is, trying to giving him the benefit of the doubt. It's possible he doesn't understand his own material, what he pointed out on his own film. Maybe he doesn't realize that if you get the guns away of those kids, they'll come into school with knives or baseball bats or home-made Molotov cocktails or planks with a rusty nail through them and still harm other people. It's likely that chasing after the rich white guy Moore demonized earlier for promoting the very same point that Moore briefly hints at (it's not the availability of guns that gets people killed) makes for better copy, specially when you contrast Uncaring Rich White Guy with Poor Dead Black Girl, giving your viewers somebody they can hate, somebody they can point fingers at. Or possibly he just realizes that it's easier to go for the quickie fix and trying to remove guns than to do a serious analysis of why neighbors are murdering each other.
In the end, he ends up using the same tool he so berates the Bush administration for using: people's fear of some unspecified looming misfortune.
Go ahead, salute the naked fallacy parading through the streets claiming to wear documentary clothes. Just don't expect me to throw rose petals in its path.
Posted by Ricardo at June 8, 2004 12:01 AM