This may well be, although I’d suspect that he’s quite fond of the irony. He claimed he wanted to make a serious run for the presidency, but this is somewhat ridiculous; he obviously wouldn’t win. It sounds more likely that he was planning a publicity stunt through his run for presidency, but had to can it for whatever reason.
This was one of the more ridiculous scenes in the movie. There’s no reason to even address this, as it clearly demonstrates nothing. My door’s unlocked right now – where’s Michael Moore when you need him?
I’m surprised that so many posters in this thread don’t seem to “get it”.
Of course that scene was ridiculous. You know it, I know it, and I’m sure Moore knows it. So why have it in his movie? Because although his original intent when he began planning the movie may have been to promote gun control, in the course of his research he began to think that maybe loose gun control laws weren’t the real problem. A good share of the blame, according to Moore, must rest on the shoulders of the media for making Americans afraid. The media exaggerates, distorts, and sometimes outright lies.
Now, he could have tried his best to make an honest, accurate, completely non-biased, and perfectly neutral film that would convey his point about the media. He could have tried, and he would have failed miserably, both in achieving true objectivity and in conveying his message. What he has done instead is to make a non-objective, biased, and often exaggerated or distorted movie that he hopes will get people talking about issues and forming their own opinions, not accepting those they’ve been spoon-fed, and above all to question the media. That’s all media, including Moore’s own movies.
I am sure that many, perhaps all, of the exaggerations or distortions in Bowling for Columbine are there intentionally. They are there for the purpose of discouraging people from completely trusting what the media tells them. This may seem contradictory or even stupid, but I think it is ultimately more honest that making a movie with the message “You can’t trust the media at all…unless it’s one of my movies!”
I don’t buy the carte blanche people are giving him. He’s done nothing to demonstrate he adequately understands the issues, and whenever confronted, supporters claim things he’s said were said in jest, or said as a sort of meta-commentary on the very nature of film/media/whatever. Because he’s so ambiguous in this movie, it can be spun either way, depending on the viewer’s existing opinions on (a) Moore, and (b) “Society”/politics. The problem is that people watching it with an open mind, as it were, won’t get much out of it. The movie Entertains, but does not Persuade; it simply pats the viewer on the back for their already-formed beliefs. If he really is an activist, and not simply a humorist, he’s doing little to push his agenda beyond his existing supporters.
susanann, you also conveniently forgot about New York: 5.0 vs. Quebec’s 2.68 and Ontario’s 1.3. In Ontario’s case–a province with the largest urban centres in Canada–this is somewhat over 1/8 of New York’s. Further, Michigan has a murder rate of 6.7, making the disparity even more ludicrous.
So, first, I can be as selective as you and prove anything I want. Give us the full story, not your edited version.
Further, Manitoba’s homicide rate, according to the cite you gave, is 2.6, not 3.58; I couldn’t find the number 3.58 anywhere on the document. Saskatchewan’s is 2.5, not 3.6. According to the site, these two provinces have the highest homicide rate, so there is no way that Alberta could be 3.0 or that BC could be 3.51. Our national homicide rate is 1.8, not 2.47.
So, second, where did you get your numbers, and why didn’t you expect anyone to check your cite?
Thanks for playing.
-Ulterior
Geographic proximity does not translate to similarity. Is California similar to Arizona. You’ve chosen to compare states bereft of large city populations with provinces that do have large cities. I mean, why compare B.C. with Idaho rather than Wasington State. That would contradict your arguement wouldn’t it. I mean there isn’t even an interstate highway to connect Idaho with B.C. through their 35 mile border.
you might check out this cite and the comparison between major cities of the two countries in 1990
Kimstu: what with the plethora of info concerning BfC in the various threads and message boards I’ve visited, I feel as though I’ve already seen it.
I think I can synthesize a somewhat accurate “picture” of what is in the movie by, oh, hmmm…averaging the pro- and con- viewpoints expressed about the film.
Heck. Maybe I should just send him $5 anyway. At least that way I won’t get stuck spending another $10 on popcorn and soda.
Gee. $10 to the plus and not having gone to see the movie!
I have a bright future in Government Economics.
BfC is not a Debate picture; it is a piece of propaganda. A very well done bit of propaganda. The best propaganda doesn’t shove a POV, it let’s you conclude it by presenting a skillfully selected collection of factoids.
One of his major points is very well made: fear sells and many powerful forces in the US have realized how to exploit fear to their own ends, never mind the consequences to society at large. Especially by the media. And by politicians.
No where is that use of fear more clear than in gun rights/control debates.
Columbine, the Washington sniper, etc iare used to sell the idea of gun control, nevermind that those types of guns are not the cause of any but a handful of the US’s numerous homicides - handguns are.
The fear that gun control nuts are going to come in and take away your hunting rifles, and the fear of the scary home invader coming in to kill you (making a loaded unlocked handgun under your pillow a sane strategy), are used by the gun rights side to argue that any federal regulation is part of a leftist conspiricy.
I’ll otherwise avoid rehashing old gun debate ground (most people here have suffered through my views in the past)* except to point one thing out.
Canada has comparable rates of gun ownership with only 1/3 the homicide rate, 2/3 of US homicides are committed with handguns and only 1/3 of Canada’s. What difference was not mentioned by BfC? The US has three times as many drug arrests (and probably similar rates of drug use).
In the MM tradition, I’ll only say: Hmmmm. What’s the cause of Canada’s lower homicide rate, eh?
*For those who have not, I am for regulation. I think that handguns should only be sold to people who have proven that they can own them responsibly, which to me includes storing them in a locked safe. I think that resale of handguns should be tightly regulated. I think that gun owners and the public at large would both be well served by a consistent federal law as opposed to the hodgepodge of federal and state laws that gun owners must suffer through today. I think that rational thinkers can look at homicide rates in the US and recognize that wide handgun availabilty is a vector that magnifies the toll in the our country, and simultaneously recognize that other fasctors contribute as well. But this post is not intended to debate those sorts of propositions.
not to contribute, but i think that kalashnikov and padeye(?) said that the license was 200 bucks. i don’t want to argue on something of which i am uninformed, but i thot that the clinton/reno ban raised the rate to 1500 per. were all of your references pre-ban, or am i misinformed? i haven’t read anything about the license cost since the ban.
You have deliberately chosen American and Canadian cities with completely opposite demographics to mislead everyone.
The ethnics, races, and incomes of Washington DC, Detroit, Atlanta, Oakland, etc are completely different from the Canadian cities you selected. Since you know that FBI Bureau of Justice statistics http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm report that blacks commit the majority of murders, you deliberately choose American cities with large black populations, and conveniently left out cities similar to Canadian cities, which have few if any blacks.
A comparison should be made of similar demographics, as I have done with the border states. It is fair to compare large or small white cities with similar income and ethnics in each country with the same, or large or small black cities with the same demographics in each country with the same.
Are you suggesting that if the entire populations of Detroit and Washington DC were switched overnite with 2 places in Canada, that the former americans would immediately stop murdering?
Are you suggesting that if the entire populations of Halifax and St Johns were transported to the now empty cities of Detroit and Washington DC, that these formerly docile Canadians would immediately go on a murder rampage?
The only thing that would be changed, is that the people of St Johns would now be living in Detroit, nothing else would change, they could have the same income level, the same race, the same jobs, etc,
Your simplistic comparison suggests that the people of St Johns would turn into violent murderers.
I gave the source for the official numbers, the Canadian and state governements.
The numbers for the Canadian provinces came from 2 different sources, but the source I gave, for the year 2000 for each, still shows that Manitoba (2.6 per 100,000) and Saskatchewan (2.5) http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/010719/d010719b.htm
are many times more dangerous than the bordering state of North Dakota with only 0.6
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/ndcrimn.htm
You did not get it the first time, so let me repeat what I said:
“Nearly every Canadian province which borders a U.S. state, has a HIGHER murder rate than a U.S. state that borders it.”
The statement stands, as North Dakota, with very similar demographics, and population density, with 0.6 is much less than its Canadian neighbors Manitoba and Saskatchewan at 2.6 and 2.5.
It is silly and misleading of you to try to compare any Canadian province with Michigan or New York, as no canadian province has nowhere near as many black people who commit most of the American murders.
Furthermore, you are also trying to compare very dense states with sparsely populated provinces. You simply cannot compare a very populated New York with the sparsely populated Quebec. You are confusing the issue by trying to compare different races and trying to compare a state with crowded populations with a province with wide open rural populations.
The population density and composition of Vermont is most closely similar to Quebec, yet has half the murder rate despite no gun control in that state:
Vermont = 1.5 http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/vtcrime.htm
Quebec = 2.68
I don’t know where you got a figure of $1,500. Also note there is no such thing as a license for a machine gun. The $200 is a tax stamp required to transfer ownership of a machine gun and must be paid each time it changes owners except when transferring to a class III dealer who has a special tax status. The price of this tax has not changed since 1934.
During the Cliton administration the 1994 crime bill banned so-called semi-automatic assault weapons - rifles, pistols and shotguns - with certain cosmetic features but this has nothing to do with machine guns which are by legal definition another kind of weapon.
The ban on registration of any new machine guns took place during the first bush administration with passage of the gun owner’s protection act but did not change the trasfer tax on NFA weapons. It is still $200 for machine guns, short barrel rifles and shotguns, sound suppressors and destructive devices and $5 for the “any other weapon” category.
Ah, yes, the bucolic land of Quebec, with its sleepy little villages, like, say…Montreal.
The population of Vermont is 70% rural. The population of Quebec is over 80% urban!!! They aren’t similar at all! They’re almost exactly the opposite of each other on a critical demographic measure!
You do realize that the city of Montreal has a metropolitan population about six times larger than that of the entire state of Vermont? Why don’t you compare the murder rate for Montreal with a comparably-sized American city?
Let’s be honest here – how many people actually do adequately understand these issues? Moore touches on a whole heck of a lot of issues in Bowling for Columbine, and I doubt there’s many people out there who have a very good understanding of all of them…or any of them.
I think you’re still misreading the movie. It doesn’t “Persuade” in the sense that Moore does not present us with The Answer to American Violence, and that is because Moore does not have the answer – and he knows it. If his goal was to get people to think about these issues and to talk about them with others (and I feel confident that it was), then this thread is pretty good proof that he has succeeded.
Nice of you to ignore the people who completely destroy your arguments and show you to be the dishonest debater you are, Susanann.
Words fail me when confronted with such astounding ignorance. Fortunately, statistics do not fail me. Therefore, a side-by-side comparison of murder rates in all American states that border Canada and the provinces they adjoin. The figures represent annual murders per 100,000 residents, and the highest murder rate for each comparison is in bold.
Washington: 3.8
British Columbia: 2.25
Idaho: 2.9
British Columbia: 2.25
Montana: 4.1
British Columbia: 2.25
Alberta: 2.20
Saskatchewan: 3.22
North Dakota: 1.1
Saskatchewan: 3.22
Manitoba: 2.90
Minnesota: 2.6
Manitoba: 2.90
Ontario: 1.47
Michigan: 7.3
Ontario: 1.37
New York: 5.1
Ontario: 1.37
Quebec: 1.87
Vermont: 2.2
Quebec: 1.87
New Hampshire: 1.5
Quebec: 1.87
Maine: 2.0
Quebec: 1.87
New Brunswick: 0.66
Thus, seven out of the ten U.S. states that border Canada have higher rates of murder than any of the Canadian provinces they border. Your claim is absolute bullshit, Susanann. I’d demand an apology out of you for attempting to spread such falsehoods across these forums, but you have a tendency to disappear every time your half-baked “facts” are revealed to be false. Until the next time you fib, adieu.
Sources:
All U.S. data is for the year 1998 (most recent year available), from the Statistical Abstract of the United States (.pdf format).
All Canadian data is also for the year 1998 (to keep the comparison as close as possible), from Statistics Canada.
You know what I think the most interesting thing is? It seems that Sasketchewan and Manitoba have the highest murder rates, but I don’t think they are the most densely populated, which is something that runs counter to intuition, IMO. Any thoughts?
Good question, Neurotic.
[talking out of my hat]
Most homicides in Canada are the result of domestic disputes or drunken fights. The folks in Newfoundland have too much sex to ever want to kill each other. The rest of the Maritimers are too drunk to be able to kill each other. People in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta are too rich to bother to kill each other. The folks in B.C. are too high to kill each other. There are not enough people in the NWT or Nunavut to calculate a murder rate per 100,000, and in the Yukon they eat their dead, so the statistics are not reliable.
That leaves Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where every winter the people are so darn depressed that they have their friends put them out of their misery.
[/talking out of my hat]
Lets compare the ratio of the aboriginal(1996) to total population(1997) for each province.
Province…Aboriginal…Total
…Population…Population. Ratio. Homicide rate
…(1996)…(1997)…(1997)
B.C…130,655…3,959,698…033…2.93
Alberta…122,840…2,837,191…043…2.15
Saskatchewan…111,245…1,022,020…109…2.45
Manitoba…128,684…1,136,584…113…2.73
Ontario…141,525…11,249,490…013…1.58
Quebec…71,415…7,302,553…010…1.81
P.E.I…950…136,852…007…0.00
New Brunswick…10,250…754,237…014…1.06
Nova Scotia…12,380…934,538…013…2.57
Newfoundland…14,204…554,076…026…1.26
Canada…799,010…29,987,214…027…1.95
When the high numbers for the murder rate for largely rural Sasketchewan and Manitoba were questioned, my experience in living in many different communities throughout most of Canada led me to immediately suspect that a larger percentage of marginalized aboriginal people existed in those two provinces. I think the above stats bear this out. Even Alberta and BC have relatively larger aboriginal populations, and the higher murder rates than the Canadian average bears this out.
While there is no doubt that inner city poverty in the United States breeds a lot of murder (enabled by guns), It is my understanding that Canada’s poverty is much different demographically.
And finally, the fact that poverty is a factor in murder rates in no way nullifies the argument that the prevalence of firearms particularly hand guns is a significant factor as well.
References:
http://www.aboriginalcanada.gc.ca/abdt/interface/cac_stats.nsf/engdoc/1.3.html
http://www.nfstats.gov.nf.ca/statistics/Population/National_Pop.asp
Muffin’s Stats Can site