Talk:Bowling for Columbine

Hello all.

I would like to suggest a few changes to this article. I want to solicit your comments and feelings before I go ahead and make them. I think rational thinkers should be informed of certain aspects of this movie.

In particular, I would like to add material about how Moore plays fast and lose with the truth at certain points in this movie. It seems that while Moore never actually tells outright lies, he does present things in such a way that a very slanted impression is created in the mind of the viewer. This movie is marketed as a documentary, but it seems much more like a polemic to me. To wit:

i) The quasi-South Park cartoon sequence. The editing in the movie makes it seem like the cartoons which appear after the interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker were produced by them (and the cartoons are stylistically very similar to SP). Matt Stone has publicly stated that while he doesn't think Moore mischaracterized him, Moore was sneaky in implying that the cartoon was produced by Stone and Parker. SP would later parody Moore, as payback for this incident.

ii)The Lockheed Martin plant visit. In this sequence, Moore asks "So you don't think our kids say to themselves, 'Dad goes off to the factory every day, he builds missiles of mass destruction.' What's the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?". Evan McCollum (communications director at Lockheed-Martin) responds:"I guess I don't see that specific connection because the missiles that you're talking about were built and designed to defend us from somebody else who would be aggressors against us." The viewer is clearly supposed to assume McCollum and his employer are hypocrites, condemning the events at Columbine while still producing missiles. Again, Moore is being selective in what he puts into the movie. While LM may still produce other WMDs, the particular plant and particular missiles shown in the scene are used to launch satellites into space. So, the footage is actually of swords being turned into plough shears. Again, this point does not detract from Moore's overall message, but his slanted and selective portrayal does not fairly and accurately represent McCallum or LM.

iii) Moore takes great pains to portray the NRA as heartless. In one sequence, he creates the impression that the NRA callously held their meeting in Denver only days after Columbine, the implication being that a more compassionate, moderate group would have cancelled the meeting. This view ignores the fact that the meeting was drastically scaled back; trade shows and entertainments were cancelled, and only the legally required members' meeting took place. So, in this matter, the NRA in fact acted with some sensitivity. I am not a fan of the NRA, and they do deserve a lot of the flak that they get. But using half-truths and selective communication to oppose them is as morally repugnant as some of the NRA's positions.

Ok. Lemme know what you think. Tuscarora 20:24, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

How about portraying Canada as a place with lots of guns and no school shootings, as though the Polytechnique massacre or the Concordia University shootings or Taber never happened? Go nuts, my friend. If I knew the way/I would take you home. 20:35, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

While the Polytechnique and Concordia shooting happened at schools, they're not the sort of event that is normally classified as a "school shooting". Concordia was a workplace shooting (faculty targeting other faculty and administration); Polytechnique was a targeted attack on women in technology by an outsider, Dawson College was an outsider looking to go out in a blaze of publicity. We have had our share of "proper" school shootings up here, no question, including Brampton and Ottawa in '75 and Taber in '99, and they'd make much better apples-to-apples examples.Essellar (talk) 09:29, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

The random page button just brought me here, and I have a suggestion of my own regarding a paragraph in this article. The paragraph states that Moore:

"...seems to move from his initial position that the unusually large amount of violence in the US is due to the number of guns in circulation towards a tentative conclusion that American society is fed on a culture of fear, intolerance, and anxiety, that leads to gun violence."

I don't think that is accurate at all. I recently sat through this turd of a film when it played on tv, and this doesn't describe the film I saw at all. Throughout the film you think he's going to say that gun violence is due to the amount of guns in America, because he keeps using stock footage that seems to suggest that, and pulling stunts like the scene at the bank, but when he actually addresses the cause of gun violence is at the end of interviews with various people, in which he says that canada has a lot of guns too, but much less gun violence, and asks the person he had interviewed, why they think that is, and they say they don't know. There is a scene where he asks a guy this question and the guy says he says he doesn't know, and asks Moore if he knows, and Moore says he doesn't know, and asks the guy AGAIN, with both men going back and forth with "I don't know"s several times - Moore's idea of 'deadpan' comedy, I guess. At no point in the film does he or anyone else in the film answer that question with anything but "I don't know". So there's no message in this film at all, just a mess. He spends an inordinate amount of time bragging about his gun enthusiasm as a youth but never bothers explaining how he was turned around (maybe he wasn't? maybe he's still into guns?). You would think for a guy who spends the whole movie saying he doesn't know what's going on with his central theme, who has no problem injecting his personal life and history into this film, he would be able to offer some kind of insight on how to go from being a gun nut to a person who makes a movie that is ostensibly anti-gun. Except it isn't anti-gun. But it is. but it isn't. Anyway the paragraph is wrong, he does not move from an initial position to a different one, he constantly reassures the viewer that he has no idea about much of anything through the entire film. This movie is a lot worse than you probably remember it being. The script is available on several websites and it proves my claims. And without all the stock clips the script looks especially schizo FairDinkum (talk) 09:36, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Got rid of section insinuating Canada and USA have comparable levels of school shooting violence

They don't, US school shooting incidents are orders of magnitude higher than Canadas, even per capita FallisBestSeason (talk) 05:36, 12 November 2022 (UTC)