Bowling For Truth

We begin with hearing 911 calls reporting that the six-year-old little girl had been shot at the Theo J. Buell Elementary School in Flint, Michigan, on February 29, 2000. We see Moore talking to the principal. He refers to the six-year-old boy killer as one who “had found a gun at his uncle’s house because his mother was being evicted.” Moore tugs at the heart stings as much as he can. In solemn, hushed tones, as a piano plays softly in the background, Moore says: “No one knew why the little boy wanted to shoot the little girl.”

But, of course, Moore is, again, lying. There is someone who knows why this murder happened. And that someone is Moore. {Insert dramatic sting here} – He tells us that the six-year old murderer’s Mom, to get food stamps and health care for her kids, “was forced to work as part of the state of Michigan’s welfare-to-work program,” a program he refers to “as tossing poor people off of welfare.”

Moore tells us that the boy’s Mom worked at Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Grill and blames the welfare-to-work program (Dick Clarks fault) for the shooting — So in Moore’s view — it’s not true that ‘no one knew why the little boy wanted to shoot the little girl’ — we just saw him blame capitalism for it! It’s Dick Clarks fault! All ridiculous of course – but a good example of how Moore argues 2 sides of an issue to make separate points.

Commenting on the murder of Kayla Rolland in a Salon.com article, titled “Is There Anything Left To Say,” Daryl Lindsey gets it right. He observes:

It isn’t about guns, it’s about neglect. The recent wave of horrific youth violence has nothing to do with gun-control laws or mandatory safety locks. It’s about the way we raise our children. [The murderer of Kayla Rolland] was living in a crack house with his uncle after being abandoned by his mother and father (who had been sent to jail). Not a terribly surprising place to find a gun — but where were the parents, the caring family or the concerned neighbors?

Moore both agrees and disagrees with this premise as I’ll get to later. Moore argues that Kayla’s shooter killed her because his mom had to work for a paycheck instead of getting free money from the government. Had the boy’s mother not been shipped to a “welfare to work” program, she might at least have had some time to spend with her son. -Not a far fetched idea. However, when one knows all the facts about the Kayla Rolland murder — not shown in BFC — it seems that there are better places to start seeking blame than a welfare-to-work program and Dick Clark. For example, Time reports (1) that the six-year-old murderer of Kayla lived in a “crack house” where, obviously, he had easy access to the .32 semiautomatic gun he took to school and shot Kayla.

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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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Moore edits & splices several Heston speeches to change their meanings.

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