By Mike Males, 11/6/02
It’s
hard to imagine a message more thoroughly muddled than Michael Moore’s “Bowling
for Columbine.” The film’s humor, colorful interviews, indignant arraignments of
corporations and right-wing gun nuts, and favorable audience reception all
raise the troubling question as to why progressive thinking on gun violence
issue remains so confused.
Moore begins with the right question--why do Americans kill each other with guns at rates staggeringly higher than any other affluent society? He then invites us to dissect the issue logically. Popular hokum masquerading as explanation doesn’t cut it.
Is it America’s
violent history? No. Germany, the UK, Japan, and other Western nations with
minuscule gun-murder rates have bloody histories as well.
Violent games
and movies? No. Other rich nations sop up blood-soaked entertainment.
Alienated kids?
No shortage of those in less homicidal cultures.
Poverty? No,
Moore says, confusing unemployment with poverty. Canadian and UK unemployment
rates are higher than the US’s.
America’s guns?
No.Canadians own plenty of guns and can buy bullets by the truckload.
Racial
diversity? No, Moore says; Canada is also multiethnic.
Moore’s statistics are
absurdly misleading. The U.S. is far more gun-infested (three times more guns,
and eight times more handguns, per person than Canada), impoverished (poverty
rates two to five times higher than Canada’s, especially for extreme and
concentrated poverty) and diverse (blacks and Hispanics comprise 26% of the
U.S. population compared to 2% of Canada’s, most of whose minorities are more
affluent Asians with low murder rates). Moore’s level of basic factuality
barely tops “Lyin’ King” Rush Limbaugh’s.
What
is this movie trying to say? On one level, complete nonsense. Moore presents
white people’s fear of blacks and Hispanics, and consequent orgy of suburban
gun-buying, as the cause of gun violence. He interviews the Flint, Michigan,
District Attorney, who claims with a straight face that inner-city gun violence
is not the problem; the problem is white suburban teens with guns. Moore lets
him get away with reinforcing this liberal copout that both evades
uncomfortable socioeconomic realities and reveals the extent to which white,
upper-class politicians only get concerned when white people die.
Moore
and the DA forgot to consult Flint area vital statistics, which show 25 times
more black inner-city teens than white suburban teens murdered by gunfire. Can’t
get white folks concerned about that. Moore’s film follows the standard media
rule: Gun killings are only important when they have white victims. Columbine’s
school gun massacre is chosen as the focus not because it is a common or
watershed event (gun massacres are common in America, but white school
shootings are extremely rare), but because its victims were suburban.
Commenting on this conundrum, Moore contradicts himself again with a bizarrely racist comment. “Ninety percent of the guns in this country are bought out in the white suburbs where you don’t need them because there’s virtually no crime,” he told Phil Donahue (MSBNBC, 10/28). “And as the prosecutor says in the film, these guns then are stolen from the white communities and end up back in the inner city, creating all this violence.”
Moore claims the problem is
that low-crime white people let guns get into the hands of violent black
people? Imagine the liberal outrage if Rush Limbaugh said that!
Having told fawning Donahue the suburbs have “virtually no crime,” Moore reverses himself yet again, telling fawning Oprah (ABC, 11/8/02) that the result of all the suburban gun-buying is that “the majority of murders” are “between white people.” Not even nearly. The latest, 2000 figures from the National Center for Health Statistics show that of 10,801 gun homicides in the U.S., 2,900 (a little more than one-fourth) involved whites; seven in 10 involved blacks and Latinos.
While
demanding that conservative gun-rights groups and corporations honestly
soul-search their self-serving illogic, Moore walks away from points that are
difficult for liberals and leftists. Blacks, 12% of the population, suffer 52%
of the nation’s gun homicide deaths--a rate 11 times higher than whites’. Nine
in 10 murdered blacks are shot by other blacks, not by whites.
Moore’s
orgy of self-contradiction concerns a political problem facing liberals in
general: blacks and Hispanics really do commit and suffer gun violence at far
higher levels than do more affluent whites. Further, it is not whites shooting
minorities but, as Tupac Shakur lamented, “It’s my own kind doing all the
killing here.” Poorer whites also have high gun murder rates; one’s odds of
dying by gunfire rise sharply in almost perfect syncopation with one’s poverty
level. Instead of confronting these stark realities, Moore trivializes black
and Hispanic gun violence as figments of white paranoia.
Is
racism justified, then? Are whites right to arm themselves in fear of poorer
gun-toters? No, as Moore’s walking tour of southcentral Los Angeles to counter
media fear-mongering about black killers symbolically demonstrates. Of course
L.A., even its most supposedly dangerous neighborhoods, is safer for whites
than they believe. Nearly all of the relatively small number of murdered whites
(84 murder victims in 2,000, in L.A.’s white population of 3 million) were
slain by their own relatives, neighbors, and acquaintences.
Meanwhile,
LA’s scourge of black gun homicide (308 murder victims in a population of 900,000)
is 12 times that of whites, and 100 times higher in Southcentral than among
LA’s suburban whites. Moore not only fails to mention this awful fact, but--in
a film supposedly concerned with gun violence--he jokes about police responding
to a gun incident that occurs right on the street where he is filming.
Still, American whites,
hardly poor as a group, suffer gun murder levels 2.5 times higher than Canadian
citizens. What is America’s problem? (We might as well blame bowling, Moore
says. The Columbine student gunboys rolled a few frames before shooting up
their school.)
Again
and again, Moore wrecks his message with grandstanding. He confronts Kmart
managers with Columbine students seeking to return store merchandise, the
bullets lodged in their bodies. He wins a store promise to phase out ammunition
sales. Liberals cheer. So what? Wal-Marts in peaceable Canada sell bullets by
the ton, as Moore himself demonstrated.
Moore
badgers impresario Dick Clark for owning restaurants that hire welfare-to-work
program recipients at low wage. More audience applause, but why? Moore earlier
claimed poverty and unemployment don’t cause American’s gun carnage. And why
hound an ignorant celebrity when he could have gotten better answers by calling
out Michigan’s welfare director?
Later, Moore interrogates National
Rifle Association president Charlton Heston over gun proliferation. Enthusiastic
audience hosannas, but to what purpose? Moore admits Canadians also own lots of
guns but don’t perpetrate our level of slaughter. And if he wanted answers, the
NRA’s legislative director would be the one to grill.
Moore
includes a lengthy roster of America’s use of military violence. What is his
point? He admits gun-free European nations have similarly bloody records.
Is “Bowling” an incisive
documentary, or just crowd-pleasers staged for liberals?
Moore’s
disingenuous confusion hijacks “Bowling” completely when he highlights the
murder of the white 6 year-old Michigan girl by a first-grade black boy. Moore
assigns blame to the poverty of the shooter’s mother caused by (a) auto
industry plant shutdowns that created chronic unemployment, and (b) Michigan’s
harsh welfare-to-work mandate that forced the mother to work long hours at
low-paying jobs, resulting in time away from mothering and eviction from their
home. But Moore earlier dismissed unemployment and poverty as factors causing
American gun violence--a standard liberal subterfuge that completely undermines
his best point.
However,
“Bowling” does reveal two uniquely American traits that may explain our gun
carnage: Americans fear each other intensely and are indifferent to their
fellow citizens’ well being. Those directly affected by a gun tragedy are the
only ones who care about it. Others are detached, motivated by political
opportunism, media ratings, and commercial interest. Moore’s otherwise
pointless interview with Heston accuses him mainly of insensitivity: the NRA
staged rallies in Colorado and Michigan following local gun tragedies. Was bad
manners really the sin?
Perhaps
so. American’s callousness to fellow citizens’ suffering, revealed countless
times in and by “Bowling,” is a key point. Canadians seem concerned about the
welfare of other Canadians and willing to translate that empathy into generous
social programs and trusting attitudes that don’t hold their fellow citizens in
poverty and suspicion. Americans fear and suspect other Americans. We reject
common responsibility out of the assumption that our own countrymen would
freeload. We buy guns for protection from each other and wind up shooting the
people around us in vastly outsized numbers.
But
why are Americans, inhabitants of the same country with shared interests, so
extraordinarily indifferent and fearful toward one another? This callousness is
shown in Michigan’s welfare system, NRA rallying at tragedy sites, the phony
press and politician exploitation of firearms murders, and the Flint District
Attorney’s and Moore’s own indifference to inner city gun violence. “Bowling”
demonstrates the extent to which Americans obsess over trivial symbols and
rigid ideologies to evade fundamental issues of state-generated inequality and
the violence it engenders. Of course, had Moore pursued the tough socioeconomic
issues instead of clichéd liberal nemeses, he wouldn’t have a film screening in
700 theaters.
Mike Males teaches sociology at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, and has written four books on youth issues.
Email
mmales@earthlink.net
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