Bowling For Truth

Transitioning from the Wonderful World montage, Bowling shows a B-52 memorial at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Moore intones:

“The plaque underneath it proudly proclaims that this plane killed Vietnamese people on Christmas Eve 1972.”

The editing that puts this scene in sequence directly following the conclusion of the “Wonderful World” montage which ends with footage of the airplanes hitting the Twin Towers implies that the United States government and Al-Qaeda both perpetrate murder by airplane. This phrasing intentionally insinuates that the plaque praises the bombing of civilians.

In fact, the plaque on the B-52 at the AFA is not as Moore describes it. The plaque says :

“B-52D Stratofortress. ‘Diamond Lil.’ Dedicated to the men and women of the Strategic Air Command who flew and maintained the B-52D throughout its 26-year history in the command. Aircraft 55-083, with over 15,000 flying hours, is one of two B-52Ds credited with a confirmed MIG kill during the Vietnam Conflict Flying out of U-Tapao Royal Thai Naval Airfield in southern Thailand, the crew of ‘Diamond Lil’ shot down a MIG northeast of Hanoi during ‘Linebacker II’ action on Christmas Eve, 1972.”

Hardly sounds like a proud proclamation of Vietnamese killing. But Moore brushes it off. According to Ebert, Moore’s response to this criticism was as follows: “I was making a point about the carpet bombing of Vietnam during the 1972 Christmas offensive. I did not say exactly what the plaque said but was paraphrasing.”

However, offering no evidence to support the claim that this historical account was in any way bragging about civilian death – Moore boldly deceives the audience here. Since he supports his opinion of the plaques supposed inferences with nothing, we must rely on grammar – none of which has a hint of anything that denotes pride in death. He of course doesn’t show the plaque so he can get away with the deception, and didn’t expecting anyone to check him on this fact, and thus gets away with it.

The truth behind the plaque is a much different story, as told by David Hardy of Hardylaw.net:

“The particular feat was accomplished by Airman First Class Albert E. Moore, who brought down a MiG-21 which was closing to attack ‘Diamond Lil.’ The reason its MiG kill was so celebrated was that a B-52 which got within range of a fighter almost always lost the fight. B-52s were built on the assumption that enemy fighters would be kept at bay by their own fighter escort, and so they had minimal defensive guns.

A WWII B-17 carried, oh, 10 to 14 (depending on model) .50 machineguns facing in every possible direction; they flew in dense formations so that there were hundreds or thousands of guns covering each direction. Facing WWII fighters, the B-17s still took severe losses.

A B-52 had only one defensive gun position, in its tail, which could cover no direction save rearwards: early models had four .50s in it, later ones a 20 mm. It had, in short, a lot less defensive capability, yet was up against modern jet fighters with hundreds of knots speed advantage, air-to-air missiles that could kill from miles off, and heavier guns for close-in. If an enemy fighter closed on a B-52, odds of survival were low.

Diamond Lil was thus commemorated for its rare feat of downing the attacking enemy fighter, instead of being downed by it.

A feat which Moore apparently finds appalling.”

Moore thus confirms the absurdity of the blame-America-first position popular among the Hollywood Left, by showing that such views require the ignoring of obvious facts — such as the difference between financial aid to a dictatorship and humanitarian aid to refugees, or between fighting enemy pilots and perpetrating war crimes against civilians.

RESPONSE:

Special notice from Spinsanity.org :

The DVD captures Moore exaggerating this still further, saying during a speech at the University of Denver on February 26, 2003 that the B-52 participated in the massive Christmas Eve bombing campaign. “And they’ve got a plaque on there proudly proclaiming that this bomber, this B-52, killed thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese — innocent civilians.”

In both cases, his representation of the plaque is extremely dishonest.

Moore introduces the wounded kids to a Public Relations lady for K-Mart telling her they were shot at Columbine “with bullets from K-Mart.” One of the kids mumbles something about how he was thinking about how K-Mart should “stop selling bullets” now that they stopped selling handguns. The PR lady says she would certainly take this message to the K-Mart Chairman who is not there at the moment.

When the K-Mart man who does the bullet-buying comes out to speak with Moore and the kids, Moore shows him their wounds “from your bullets.” We then see Moore and these shamefully exploited kids going to the local nearby K-Mart where they buy all the bullets and take them back to K-Mart headquarters. Then, amazingly, we see a K-Mart PR lady reading a statement saying that K-Mart “is phasing out the sale of all handgun ammunition… in the continental United States in the next 90 days.”

Seeking an explanation of this gutless cave-in, we called K-Mart headquarters and talked to Michele Jasukaitus, a spokesman for K-Mart. After several days of waiting, Jasukaitus told us she couldn’t answer our questions because the three top executives involved in this policy change were no longer with K-Mart.

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A perfect example of Moore’s disingenuous explorations for truth is when he ironically interviews and cites the work of USC Professor Barry Glassner, whose book The Culture of Fear attacks the media for sensationalizing incidents of bad news while ignoring the bigger picture. One of the book’s primary examples is extensive media coverage of school shootings that ignores the overall downward trend in youth violence in recent years.

Moore criticizes weakly researched media stories that scare people over nothing (such as phony stories about razors in Halloween apples), but at the same time, his own factual claims are either invented or taken grossly out of context.

For instance, Moore lets Glassner criticize the media for sharply increasing coverage of homicides during a period when the actual homicide rate was falling. Yet his own frantic film about the terrible dangers of American gun violence comes even as gun crime rates have fallen sharply from their early 1990s levels. Glassner’s book points out that an American schoolchild is much more likely to be killed by lightning than in a school shooting. Yet Moore’s film rests on the premise that the Columbine shooting represents an American epidemic of violence.

Even while denouncing Americans for being so afraid of violent crime, Bowling for Columbine works hard to make them still more afraid…

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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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