If Moore were simply trying to assert that there’s something wrong with banks giving away guns as a premium, film of the bank’s actual normal procedure (Moore picking up a certificate for pickup at a gun dealer, providing information for a background check, and going to the gun dealer after passing the check with a bit of narration indicating the time lapse) would suffice. The dishonesty comes in when the presentation was specially set up so that Moore walked into the bank and walked out with a gun.
Fair enough, I guess. But you’re weird.
I guess it goes to show differing perspectives–I didn’t see a bank giving out what were clearly hunting weapons as any more particularly strange/odd than toasters or sets of tools. I had been under the impression when I watched F9/11 that he was indicting the ease of gun acquisition and trying to downplay the existence of BATFE forms and the instant background check. Also, this:
Every time I’ve seen this kind of giveaway (more commonly at gun raffles up here), it goes like that. My mom just won a prize in a 50/50 charity gun raffle, for example–she bought the tickets for the half that was going to the local fire hall’s budget, incidentally, she cares nought for guns. On the list of prizes, what she won was a “.22 lever-action rifle (I forget the brand)”. What she was handed at the raffle was a gift certificate to a local army/navy store that has a gun store for the amount of 15% less than the gun’s purchase price, and a coupon for 15% off that specific gun. When she went to pick it up, she got the full background check and everything associated with a normal legal gun sale, and in fact she could have bought some boots or camping supplies with the gift cert had she really wanted to.
If you watch the scene, the teller says explicitly that they “have a vault” with “500 firearms” and that they are “a licensed dealer”, so that was not dishonest at all. Unless the bank manager and tellers were co-opted into making stuff up for the camera, that was completely legit.
I suppose it depends entirely on whether you see “gun = tool” or “gun = special, different class of object”. Certainly either perspective is valid, I just happen to hold the first one in my day-to-day life.
So, Steve MB, I see that this line of evidence has been shot down. There are banks that give out free guns.The sequence was apparently NOT faked. The sequence may have been given “spin” in that he did not show all the paperwork that was filled out properly, but NOT faked.
So it appears that Master Wang-Ka, was wrong. Incorrect. Full of shit.
Would anyone else like to try to chip in?
Perhaps there is secret proof somewhere that Moore released film that had overdubbed dialog in that the original participants did not hear? Or that Moore showed clips of himself in an outrageous costume that the original participants did not see?
Or alternatively, could anyone provide evidence that Moore has been convicted of entering a federal property under false pretenses?
Fine. Legit.
Was Moore’s footage "faked’? Is there a bank that gives it’s customers free guns?
This is the point - Is Moore a dishonest hack who faked this footage? Yes or No?
That was exactly the impression I got from the first time I saw it, hence my comments above.
Whatever you say.
Is there no end to Michael Moore’s lies?!
Typically, people think that the idea is to minimize the number of firearms in a bank. Moore’s point in the movie and in that scene was that there’s something weird about America and guns, and you’re helping to further the point. It’s a little like pointing out that they followed all the rules on Ski Mask Day, or complied with all regulations on high speed industrial capacity drill promotion weekend.
No. I don’t think he faked the footage. I think it happened exactly as was portrayed on camera. But I think he omitted things (noted in a previous post) that made it look like he walked in, opened an account, and walked out with a rifle without undergoing any checks. Where’s his copy of the 4473, for instance? What, no case for a new firearm? I believe those parts were staged for his purposes. But the purchase wasn’t.
Speaking of caliber, have y’all heard the NRA’s new theme song?
But my question upon watching that scene wasn’t one of wondering whether he’d gone through the proper checks. I assumed that he had and that the bank had followed the letter of the law. Banks are pretty anal about that kind of stuff. It was “why is a bank giving its customers guns?” What would showing him filing out the forms you indicate (which I’m not even familiar with and wouldn’t recognize) have done to change the point he was making in that scene?
No you don’t.
You’re invariably one of the gun owners in the bazillion gun control threads (the one about whether concealed carriers should notify theirs hosts they’re carrying, for example) who makes a point of admitting that guns are unusually dangerous and that the rules for guns are different than the rules for everything else.
I mean, you are probably statistically more likely to kill yourself or someone else with something else a bank might give away (say, a car) but I think you’d agree that the standard you’d hold a bank to for a free car giveaway is much lower than the one you’d hold them to for a gun.
So, it’s come to this. A major-league lying asshole like Michael Moore is being compared with a straight face to a flash-in-the-pan pipsqueak like O’Keefe whose testicles haven’t even descended. Michael Moore is the Rush Limbaugh of the left – remember that meme? Those are the big hitters. O’Keefe is in the league with the “morans” guy and the lady who didn’t understand that Medicare was a government program.
Okay, here’s what Moore has in common with O’Keefe: His own fans can’t run away from him fast enough when he gets caught being full of shit. I mean, Limbaugh’s fans never lose the faith, whatever the facts may be, whereas even Moore’s biggest supporters know not to take anything he says at face value.
The O’Keefe of the left isn’t Moore, it’s some other jerkwad who hasn’t gotten around to pulling a timely bit of over-hyped fraud because he’s too stoned to leave the house.
Look, you may admire O’Keefe for the youthful zeal he brings to his mendacity and attention-whoring. I’m sure you wish you could be so energetic and short-sighted in an age when fleeting internet fame is just waiting to be grasped by whoever can film himself squeezing out the biggest turd. But Moore is an old campaigner, an attention-whore of the olde schoole. Take it steady, boy. You’ve got a whole lifetime. Try to make the whoring last.
The reason Michael Moore pisses me off is mainly because he really didn’t need to be dishonest, and if he had been able to resist the temptation he could have been so much more effective. He was talking about and uncovering things that people weren’t aware of at a time when few other people were, and he did that very effectively, but his editing techniques were dishonest as hell. He didn’t tend to lie directly but he wasn’t afraid to spin things extremely dishonestly and try to make implications beyond the evidence, and I can’t really figure out why given that most of the facts were in his favour.
Bowling for Columbine made some excellent points (as an aside, a lot of the people complaining about the film, had clearly never watched the thing, he actually argues against the availability of firearms as the primary factor in US violent crime) but he couldn’t resist some tricky editing in order to make the NRA and Heston look bad which gave his critics just the thing that they needed to latch on to. Same with 911, he abandons plenty of important points about the circumstances surrounding the attack in favour of spending more time with “my pet goat” and stupid conspiracy theories.
An actual transaction is not anything as sensational as that. He made it into a public spectacle (“Hey, look at me and the rifle on my shoulder!”), and (again) he made it look like they gave them away to anybody with no safeguards whatsoever.
I’ve said before that Moore lies by inference and lies by omission. This was both in the same scene, if you ask me.
Just going on the record to say I’m another liberal who loathes Moore. I think that all he *really *cares about is people laving him with attention, and he’ll use manipulative techniques to get it, ones that can be turned into gotcha-ya moments by the opposition, thus undermining everything he’s done in an alleged attempt to influence opinions.
However, I also don’t think he approaches anything like Limbaugh, O’Keefe, Beck, et al.
I was thinking of phrasing it more carefully, and I should have. Yeah, let me rephrase–guns are a unusually potentially dangerous tool; however, while I would absolutely insist a bank followed the law in making sure that any guns it gave away were to a person legally allowed to own them, I don’t find that any more particularly remarkable than making sure a person has appropriate license, title, and insurance before they can drive away their free car.
I agree that he sometimes does both (I lost a shittonne of respect for him after finding out that he actually met with the CEO of Ford during the filming of Roger and Me. It was only the conclusion of his movie that he didn’t!). But I don’t agree that this was one of those times. The things you bring up don’t change what I took out of the scene. Like I said, it never occurred to me that they wouldn’t have followed proper procedure for acquiring a firearm.