NRA

I got myself a copy of Bowling for Columbine today. It’s that other documentary that Michael Moore, the director of Fahrenheit 9/11, made. I must say that I found it to be a lot better and more intelligent than Fahrenheit. As with Fahrenheit, Columbine isn’t the most objective documentary ever. But’s it’s pretty damn convincing at saying what it wants to say.

The movie starts off introducing the shooting that took place in Columbine High School, Michigan. Twelve students and a teacher were killed by two male students carrying guns they legally purchased and 9mm rounds they got for 17 cents apiece at Kmart. Michael Moore then goes on to explore the question of why America is the country with the highest gun-related homocide rate among the developed nations of the world. His main points are that the media is responsible for creating a climate of fear among the people and the government is responsible for setting an example of resolving problems with violence. Personally I think that the second point is just Moore being anti-Bush (who is featured many times throughout the movie), and that Moore also tried to avoid angering the average gun owner, which took away some of the overall effect. But the first point was dead on. The news creates fear to gain viewership, which causes people to stop trusing others because they think that their little town is a lot more dangerous than it really is. It’s a great contrast when Moore takes a trip from Detroit to Canada and you see that the doors in that Canadian town he was in were all not locked.

But personally, I think that the greatest cause of gun-related murder is still the gun itself, which is something that the film seems to dismiss, probably because the producers didn’t want to isolate viewers who are gun owners. The fact is, a gun places too much power into the hands of questionable people. In the right hands, it can save lives, but when you allow private gun ownership, there is a 100% chance that it will eventually end up in the wrong hands every so often. If these gun nuts need to own guns just to protect their family, then they must live in an awfully shitty place. Do these people distrust their democratic system so much that they absolutely have to have firearms in case one day they need to storm the White House and overthrow the government? I realize that the second admendment speaks of the right to bear arms, but I think the people took it too literally when they concluded that this refers to the right to private ownership of semi-automatic weapons. I don’t think that those founding fathers knew what “arms” will be like today when they said that. The fact is, private ownership of guns seldom does what it claims to do.

Sure, a woman might be unable to defend herself from a gun-wielding robber without owning a gun. But in Singapore and many civilized parts of the world, robbers don’t have guns in the first place. This American concept of self defence is just ridiculous. You need a gun to protect yourself from bad guys who have guns because the right that allows you to have guns also allows them to have guns. So why don’t you just take the guns from everyone? Oh right, just in case that you need to overthrow your democratically-elected government someday because the US government is really that tyrannical. I guess if you think that the possibility of that is serious enough, six-year-olds shooting other six-year-olds dead is just an unfortunate, but necessary, side effect.