In Bowling for Columbine, filmmaker Michael Moore takes a look at the thorny issue of gun control, the NRA (National Rifle Association) and how the uncontrolled proliferation of guns in society can adversely affect its well-being.
He starts out with the view point that contradicts ’’Guns don’t kill people, people kill people’’ by basically saying that ’’People can’t kill people that easily if it were not for guns’’. The movie’s foundation is the shootings in Columbine High School.
Along with two survivors of Columbine, he hilariously criticizes K-Mart for making guns and ammunition so easy to procure. He speaks to the PR man at Lockheed Martin (the world’s largest manufacturer of ballistic missiles) who talks about how to manage anger in front of the dreaded bombs themselves, without noticing the irony of the situation.
He also compares the levels of violence in the US to Canada (where the number of people owning guns is higher) and finds that the level of violence is lower. He concludes that violence has permeated American society more than it has permeated other societies.
He covers a meeting in Flint, Michigan where Charlon Heston the president of the NRA says that guns will be taken from him only when he’s dead. Moore manages to interconnect the NRA and the KKK. I am surprised that he didn’t mention or interview anybody from the Michigan Militia which spawned Timothy McVeigh(Okhaloma City bomber).
Then he interviews Charlton Heston in his mansion, where Heston makes a statement ’’The only problem with this country is multiple-ethnicity’’. You would wonder if Heston is senile or is Hitler reborn to finish the ’’job’’.
My only problem with the movie is its message of totally abolishing guns, because what would say somebody in a farm where it takes 45 mins for the cops to arrive, defend themselves from would-be assailants.
But the movie in its entirety, vows with its directness in addressing this issue and the timing of the movie was appropriate when the war on Iraq was about to start.