Moore blames a school shooting on Dick Clark
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Moore props up uninformed anti-American rhetoric
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Moore gives 2 false representations by adding and editing 2 commercials to present it as one.
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Eric Harkleroad of The Daily Princetonian:
Mr. Moore and his staff were not immediately available for comment via an email address listed on the film’s website, so it is still unclear to me exactly what the numbers represent. However, what is clear is that they are highly inaccurate and unrepresentative of the true differences in the homicide rates between the listed countries.
This fact can be verified by checking official international crime statistics, which are archived on the website of Interpol, an international police organization, at www.interpol.int. The explicit link to the Interpol reports as well as copies of the calculations I am about to describe (in Excel, html and text formats) are publicly accessible at www.princeton.edu/~eharkler.
For each of countries listed in the preview for Mr. Moore’s film, I looked up both the number of homicides and the population in the year 2000. I then normalized the homicide rate to homicides per 100,000 people. For example, in 2000 there were 2,770 homicides in Germany among a total population of 82,163,475. This yields 2770/ 82,163,475 * 100,000 = 3.37 homicides per 100,000 people in the year 2000. Similar calculations for each of the countries listed allow us to compare the homicide rates in the different countries and to perform a check of Mr. Moore’s numbers.
According to Mr. Moore’s numbers, the homicide rate in the U.S. is 30 times greater than that of Germany, and 285 times greater than that of Japan. However, based on Interpol statistics for 2000, these numbers are actually 1.64 and 5.03, respectively — a difference which is not due to technical or statistical error, but likely to a creative and narrow choice of source data on Mr. Moore’s part. Most likely Mr. Moore’s numbers are not actually fabricated, but rather chosen from a year in which the homicide rate in the U.S. relative to other countries was unusually high and not representative of the average over time. As the Interpol data for 2000 shows, a broader perspective might yield more sober results.
And that is pretty much what David Hardy cam up with when he did the following research on his site:
Germany:
Bowling says 381: 1995 figures put homicides at 1,476, about four times what Bowling claims, and gun homicides at 168, about half what it claims: it’s either far too high or far too low.
Australia:
Bowling says 65. This is very close, albeit picking the year to get the data desired and although it’s misleading when given as an average.
Between 1980-1995, firearm homicides varied from 64-123, although never exactly 65. In 2000, it was 64, which was proudly proclaimed as the lowest number in the country’s history. Is it really honest to be taking a countries lowest number in history as it’s average when making an argument in comparison to another country?
United States:
Bowling says 11,127. FBI figures put it a lot lower. They report gun homicides were 8,719 in 2001, 8,661 in 2000, 8,480 in 1999. (2001 UCR, p. 23). Here’s the table:
* David Hardy found a way to compute precisely 11,127. Ignore the FBI & use Nat’l Center for Health Statistics figures. These are based on doctors’ death certificates rather than police investigation.
Then — to their gun homicide figures, add the figure for legally-justified homicides: self-defense and police use against criminals. Presto, you have exactly Moore’s 11,127. I can see no other way for him to get it.
Since Moore appears to use police figures for the other countries, it’s hardly a valid comparison. More to the point, it’s misleading since it includes self-defense and police: when we talk of a gun homicide problem we hardly have in mind a woman defending against a rapist, or a cop taking out an armed robber.
United States:
Bowling says 11,127. FBI figures put it a lot lower. They report gun homicides were 8,719 in 2001, 8,661 in 2000, 8,480 in 1999. (2001 UCR, p. 23). Here’s the table:
* David Hardy found a way to compute precisely 11,127. Ignore the FBI & use Nat’l Center for Health Statistics figures. These are based on doctors’ death certificates rather than police investigation.
Then — to their gun homicide figures, add the figure for legally-justified homicides: self-defense and police use against criminals. Presto, you have exactly Moore’s 11,127. I can see no other way for him to get it.
Since Moore appears to use police figures for the other countries, it’s hardly a valid comparison. More to the point, it’s misleading since it includes self-defense and police: when we talk of a gun homicide problem we hardly have in mind a woman defending against a rapist, or a cop taking out an armed robber.
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Bowling for Columbine has within it an original animated cartoon which purports to outline the ways that racial fear from white men who feared everything from the time the Pilgrims arrived has shaped U.S. sensibility. Of course the cartoon is highly oversimplified on purpose to make its points – but the scene is also highly dishonest, distorted and factually inaccurate.
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Bowling contains a sequence filmed at a Lockheed-Martin manufacturing facility near Columbine. Moore places a Lockheed Martin executive, right in front of a mammoth, menacing-looking rocket and asks:
“So you don’t think our kids say to themselves, ‘Gee, you know, Dad goes off to the factory every day and, you know, he builds missiles. These are weapons of mass destruction.’ What’s the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?’”
Dave Kopel from The National Review comments on this argument by Moore:
Of course the connection is nonsense. While one killer’s father once served in the Air Force, neither family worked in the defense industry. The other killer’s parents were gun-control advocates — so much so that they forbade him to play with toy guns — unlike the many children who are shown with toy guns elsewhere in the film. One of the killers’ gun suppliers was the son of a Colorado anti-gun activist. Thus, Moore might just as well have asked a spokesman for a gun-prohibition group if “our kids say to themselves, ‘Well, gee, mom and day say that guns are just for killing innocent people. So if I have a gun, I guess I should use it for killing innocent people.’
Moore continues. The next shot is of a safety slogan banner displayed at the plant that reads “It has to be foreign-object free”
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Moore edits & splices several Heston speeches to change their meanings.
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Another scene staged in Bowling for Columbine is the illustration of the story being told of a couple of hunters who dressed up a dog in hunting clothes, gave him a gun, and then accidentally got shot by it.
There are some trivial, rather silly details in the scene that arise from simple shoddy filmmaking. The scene shows a dog with gun on it’s back & a wounded hunter lying on the ground. We’re supposed to think we’re watching video from the accident, but several mistakes make this pretty obviously not true.
1. The dog is calmly moving around — which it wouldn’t be if a hunting rifle had just gone off over his head and blown his eardrums in.
2. The Hunter, who was in fact shot in the leg, is lying there quietly – dare I say ‘dead looking.’ (I’m reminded of the scene towards the end of Trainspotting where a kitten innocently plays around a dead character).
3. Why would someone just be standing there filming this? They would no doubt be panicking to get help or help their wounded comrade in some kind of frenzy — not calmly video taping the whole thing.
So the scene is staged. So what. The emphasis is on truth here – you’re allowed to reenact things in documentaries – what’s the big deal?
Well, what’s more important is the fact that in reality, the Darwin Award winning hunters had tried to take a photo with a still camera, and did not have video (1). So in fact – this is no reenactment…but a fabrication. Moore films the scene with a shaky hand held cam to create the illusion of a home movie and even goes as far as to put digits in the (viewers) right-hand top and bottom of the screen as if you are looking through a home movie camera live (another subliminal trick that makes you think this is a real home movie).
Moore is trying to make you think that this is footage from a home video recording of the actual event, when it is really quite fictitious (like on Unsolved Mysteries & America’s Most Wanted – only they tell you what you’re seeing has been set up).
Not a huge damnation of the entire film by far, but information you the viewer should know when believing Michael Moore’s statements of “liking non-fiction while living in fictitious times” and accepting Bowling for Columbine as an honest depiction of fact and truth telling documentary, as it shows the degree to which he goes to try and deceive his viewer.