Bowling for Columbine:Ten Years Later

Late Sunday night, a terrible reminder a national tragedy was thrust before my eyes. I was flipping through the channels about 10:45pm when I saw the Michael Moore's film “Bowling for Columbine,” which was released in October 2002, had just begun. I had missed just the first few minutes but immediately hit the record button and gave it my full attention until I fell asleep a little after midnight.

When I got up this morning, I turned on my DVR and watched the film in its entirety. The heart wrenching images of young people dying at the hands of other young people, including the Columbine massacre and the accidental shooting of one 6 year old child by another 6 year old child brought tears to my eyes. The source of these tears was both despair and rage, because juxtaposed against the searing images was footage of Charlton Heston, president of the NRA, holding rallies in both locations, as bad luck would have it, just days after these tragedies occurred. His apparent indifference and lack of insight into the scope of the problem he helps to promote had me cursing at my TV.

At one point in the movie, Mr. Moore makes an excellent point by showing how young people all over the world are exposed to the same sort of ritualized and glorified violence as American youth. Yet worldwide murder statistics demonstrate how the United States is far and away the most violent first world nation on earth. The numbers cited were startling. In other first world countries, the highest number he could find was in Germany where there were 381murders committed with a gun. The exact year is not clear. The lowest number was in Japan, where there were just 39 murders committed with a gun. Then he shows the number for the US: 11,127 murders committed with a gun in one year. The stark difference speaks volumes about the culture of violence and fear that has been fostered by the media and reinforced by the government.

After it was over and I was channel flipping again, just by chance I came upon a show called Vanguard which was doing an expose on gun violence in America. This program was released in 2009 and followed a reporter to two locations. The first was in Kentucky where supporters of gun ownership proudly showed off their hardware and declared themselves real Americans who were doing nothing more than exercising their second Amendment rights. The second location was Camden NJ, which has several times been declared the most dangerous city in America. It showed how the easy availability of guns has created a massive law enforcement problem and devastated the local economy.

I looked at Wikipedia and saw how Mr. Moore's film had received multiple accolades upon its release and then I thought about the fact that although it had won all these awards, it had not changed the world at all. We are still bombarded nightly with example after example of brutal violence and the reinforcement of the culture of fear.

So I decided to do a little digging to see if maybe things had changed for the worse in other parts of the world, with the notion that maybe economic hardship had made people in other parts of the world more violent.

But my theory was not supported by the evidence. In five minutes I was able to find the following numbers. In 2009, the number of gun murders in the US, according to the FBI, fell to 10,224. The number of gun murders in Japan for the same year? Seven. In the United Kingdom the number is 63 and in Germany, 381, the exact same number as Mr. Moore cites.

So while the 5% drop in the number of gun murders may give me a slight reason to feel encouraged, the numbers from the rest of the world still prove that the US is a far more violent place to live and ten years after Mr. Moore's film slapped us in the face, we still haven't awakened to face the reality.

Mr. Moore's film made one very salient point to answer the question of why America is so violent. Fear keeps people consuming. Consumption is a large part of the American economy. This is the status quo and some very powerful people profit from the status quo. Those powerful people make a lot of political contributions. Think about that the next time the network news shows footage of a child shot dead in the street.