...continued:
Moore, who had plenty of time to prepare, continues the impression he has created, asking Heston misleading questions such as: "After that happened you came to Flint to hold a big rally and, you know, I just, did you feel it was being at all insensitive to the fact that this community had just gone through this tragedy?" Moore continues, "you think you'd like to apologize to the people in Flint for coming and doing that at that time?"
Moore knows the real sequence, and knows that Heston does not. Moore takes full advantage.
As noted above, Moore's deception works on reviewers. In fact, when Heston says he did not know about Kayla's shooting when he went to Flint, viewers see Heston as an inept liar:
"Then, he [Heston] and his ilk held ANOTHER gun-rally shortly after another child/gun tragedy in Flint, MI where a 6-year old child shot and killed a 6-year old classmate (Heston claims in the final interview of the film that he didn't know this had just happened when he appeared)." [Click here for original]
Bowling persuaded these viewers by deceiving them. Moore's creative skills are used to convince the viewer that things happened which did not and that a truthful man is a liar when he denies them.
A further question: is the end of the Heston interview faked?
3. Animated sequence equating NRA with KKK. In an animated history send-up, with the narrator talking rapidly, Bowling equates the NRA with the Klan, suggesting NRA was founded in 1871, "the same year that the Klan became an illegal terrorist organization." Bowling goes on to depict Klansmen becoming the NRA and an NRA character helping to light a burning cross.
This sequence is intended to create the impression either that NRA and the Klan were parallel groups or that when the Klan was outlawed its members formed the NRA.
Both impressions are not merely false, but directly opposed to the real facts.
Fact: The NRA was founded in 1871 -- by act of the New York Legislature, at request of former Union officers. The Klan was founded in 1866, and quickly became a terrorist organization. One might claim that while it was an organization and a terrorist one, it technically became an "illegal" such with passage of the federal Ku Klux Klan Act and Enforcement Act in 1871. These criminalized interference with civil rights, and empowered the President to use troops to suppress the Klan. (Although we'd have to acknowledge that murder, terror and arson were illegal long before that time -- the Klan hadn't been operating legally until 1871, it was operating illegally with the connivance of law enforcement.)
Fact: The Klan Act and Enforcement Act were signed into law by President Ulysess S. Grant. Grant used their provisions vigorously, suspending habeas corpus and deploying troops; under his leadership over 5,000 arrests were made and the Klan was dealt a serious (if all too short-lived) blow.
Fact: Grant's vigor in disrupting the Klan earned him unpopularity among many whites, but Frederick Douglass praised him, and an associate of Douglass wrote that African-Americans "will ever cherish a grateful remembrance of his name, fame and great services."
Fact: After Grant left the White House, the NRA elected him as its eighth president.
Fact: After Grant's term, the NRA elected General Philip Sheridan, who had removed the governors of Texas and Lousiana for failure to suppress the KKK.
Fact: The affinity of NRA for enemies of the Klan is hardly surprising. The NRA was founded by former Union officers, and eight of its first ten presidents were Union veterans.
Fact: During the 1950s and 1960s, groups of blacks organized as NRA chapters in order to obtain surplus military rifles to fight off Klansmen.
.4. Shooting at Buell Elementary School in Michigan. Bowling depicts the juvenile shooter who killed Kayla Rolland as a sympathetic youngster, from a struggling family, who just found a gun in his uncle's house and took it to school. "No one knew why the little boy wanted to shoot the little girl."
Fact: The little boy was the class thug, already suspended from school for stabbing another kid with a pencil, and had fought with Kayla the day before. Since the incident, he has stabbed another child with a knife.
Fact: The uncle's house was the family business -- the neighborhood crack-house. The gun was stolen and was purchased by the uncle in exchange for drugs.The shooter's father was already serving a prison term for theft and drug offenses. A few weeks later police busted the shooter's grandmother and aunt for narcotics sales. After police hauled the family away, the neighbors applauded the officers. This was not a nice but misunderstood family.
Links:1., 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
5. The Taliban and American Aid. In discussing military assistance to various countries, Bowling asserts that the U.S. gave $245 million in aid to the Taliban government of Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001.
Fact: The aid in question was humanitarian assistance, given through UN and nongovernmental organizations, to relieve famine in Afghanistan. [Various numbers are given for the amount of the aid, and some say several million went for clearing landmines.]
6. International Comparisons. To pound home its point, Bowling flashes a dramatic count of gun homicides in various countries: Canada 165, Germany 381, Australia 65, Japan 39, US 11,127. Now that's raw numbers, not rates -- Here's why he doesn't talk rates.
Verifying the figures was difficult, since Moore does not give a year for them. A lot of Moore's numbers didn't check out for any period I could find. As a last effort at checking, I did a Google search for each number and the word "gun" or words "gun homicides" Many traced -- only back to webpages repeating Bowling's figures. Moore is the only one using these numbers.
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. 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.
US: 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:
[You can download the entire report, in .pdf format, by clicking here; look for pt. 2 at p.23.] To be utterly fair, this is a count of the 13,752 homicides for which police submitted supplemental data (including weapon used): the total homicide count was 15,980. But what weapon, if any, was used in the other homicide is unknown to us, and was unknown to Moore.
After an email tip, I finally 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.
Canada: Moore's number is correct for 1999, a low point, but he ignores some obvious differences.
Bias. I wanted to talk about fabrication, not about bias, but I've gotten emails asking why I didn't mention that Switzerland requires almost all adult males to have guns, but has a lower homicide rate than Great Britain, or that Japanese-Americans, with the same proximity to guns as other Americans, have homicide rates half that of Japan itself. Okay, they're mentioned, now back to our regularly scheduled program.
7. Miscellaneous. Even the Canadian government is jumping in. Bowling shows Moore casually buying ammunition at an Ontario Walmart. He asks us to "look at what I, a foreign citizen, was able to do at a local Canadian Wal-Mart." He buys several boxes of ammunition without a question being raised. "That's right. I could buy as much ammunition as I wanted, in Canada."
Canadian officials have pointed out that the buy is faked or illegal: Canadian law has since, 1998, required ammunition buyers to present proper identification. Since Jan. 1, 2001, it has required non-Canadians to present a firearms borrowing or importation license, too. (Bowling appears to have been filmed in mid and late 2001).
While we're at it: Bowling shows footage of a B-52 on display at the Air Force Academy, while Moore scornfully intones that the plaque under it "proudly proclaims that the plane killed Vietnamese people on Christmas Eve of 1972."
The plaque actually reads that "Flying out of Utapao Royal Thai Naval Airfield in southeast Thailand, the crew of 'Diamond Lil' shot down a MIG northeast of Hanoi during 'Linebacker II' action on Christmas eve 1972." This is pretty mild compared to the rest of Bowling, but the viewer can't even trust Moore to honestly read a monument.
(As Spinsanity notes, Moore goes even farther in his add-on DVD. There, he tells us, "And they've got a plaque on there proudly proclaiming that this bomber, this B-52, killed thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese -- innocent civilians.")
8. Race. Moore does not directly state that Heston is a racist--he is the master of creating the false impression --but reviewers come away saying "Heston looks like an idiot, and a racist one at that" Source. "BTW, one thing the Heston interview did clear up, that man is shockingly racist." Source.
The remarks stem from Heston's answer (after Moore keeps pressing for why the US has more violence than other countries) that it might be due to the US "having a more mixed ethnicity" than other nations, and "We had enough problems with civil rights in the beginning." A viewer who accepts Moore's theme that gun ownership is driven by racial fears might conclude that Heston is blaming blacks and the civil rights movement.
But if you look at some history missing from Bowling, you get exactly the opposite picture. Heston is talking, not about race, but about racism. In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement was fighting for acceptance. Civil rights workers were being murdered. The Kennedy Administration, trying to hold together a Democratic coalition that ranged from liberals to fire-eater segregationists such as George Wallace and Lester Maddox, found the issue too hot to touch, and offered little support.
Heston got involved. He picketed discriminating restaurants. He worked with Martin Luther King, and helped King break Hollywood's color barrier (yes, there was one.). He led the actors' component of King's 1963 march in Washington, which set the stage for the key civil rights legislation in 1964.
Here's Heston's comments at the 2001 Congress on Racial Equality Martin Luther King dinner (presided over by NRA director, and CORE President, Roy Innes). More on Heston.
Most of the viewers were born long after the events Heston is recalling. To them, the civil rights struggle consists of Martin Luther King speaking, people singing "We Shall Overcome," and everyone coming to their senses. Heston remembers what it was really like.
If Heston fails to explain this in Bowling, we've got to note that Moore (despite his claim that he left the interview almost unedited) cut a lot of the interview out. Watch closely and you'll see a clock on the wall near Moore's head. When it's first seen, the time is about 5:47. When Heston finally walks out, it reads about 6:10. That's 23 minutes. I clocked the Heston interview in Bowling at 5 1/4 minutes. About three-quarters of what Heston did say was trimmed out. [Why the clock indicates six o'clock, when Moore is specific that he showed up for the interview at 8:30 AM, will have to await another investigation!]
9. Fear. Bowling probably has a good point when it suggests that the media feeds off fear in a search for the fast buck. Bowling cites some examples: the razor blades in Halloween apples scare, the flesh-eating bacteria scare, etc. The examples are taken straight from Barry Glassner's excellent book on the subject, "The Culture of Fear," and Moore interviews Glassner on-camera for the point.
Then Moore does exactly what he condemns in the media.
Given the prominence of schoolyard killings as a theme in Bowling for Columbine, Moore must have asked Glassner about that subject. Whatever Glassner said is, however, left on the cutting-room floor. That's because Glassner lists schoolyard shootings as one of the mythical fears. He points out that "More than three times as many people are killed by lightning as by violence at schools."
I suppose we might go farther, and ask if Moore's film is not illustrative of what it condemns. Moore argues that the media (a) distorts reality, and (b) hypes fear of other Americans, because (c) fear is good for a fast buck. Moore distorts reality, hypes fear of other Americans ("are we nation of gun nuts, or just nuts?") and, well, made several million fast bucks.
10. Guns (supposedly the point of the film). A point worth making (although not strictly on theme here): Bowling's theme is, rather curiously, not opposed to firearms ownership.
After making out Canada to be a haven of nonviolence, Moore asks why. He proclaims that Canada has "a tremendous amount of gun ownership," somewhat under one gun per household. He visits Canadian shooting ranges, gun stores, and in the end proclaims "Canada is a gun loving, gun toting, gun crazy country!"
Or as he put it elsewhere, "then I learned that Canada has 7 million guns but they don't kill each other like we do. I thought, gosh, that's uncomfortably close to the NRA position: Guns don't kill people, people kill people."
Bowling concludes that Canada isn't peaceful because it lacks guns and gun nuts -- it has lots of those -- but because the Canadian mass media isn't into constant hyping of fear and loathing, and the American media is. (One problem).
Which leaves us to wonder why the Brady Campaign/Million Moms issued a press release. congratulating Moore on his Oscar nomination.
Or does Bowling have a hidden punch line, and in the end the joke is on them?
One possible explanation: did Bowling begin as one movie, and end up as another?
Incidentally, Moore has issued a webpage responding to criticism. In so doing, he actually admits that much of the above criticism is accurate. He did splice the Willie Horton ad, and Heston's "cold dead hands" was never spoken at Denver, and his statistics do stem from those of the Center for Disease Control, which include self-defense and police shootings of perps. As far as the rest of the criticisms above -- strange, but Moore doesn't have an answer.
hardylaw.net |
