Hi all,
a very opinionated friend of mine claims that Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine contains a number of important factual errors, the one my friend cited was that the kids who perpetrated the Columbine Highschool massacre did NOT actually go bowling on the morning of the massacre. Does anyone know whether this is true or not? It seems strange that a documentary would be released with a error that big.
thanks,
Mogiaw
Forbes has an article on the errors here:
So according to Forbes the police say no bowling took place.
But then we have this Salon story, in which another kid in at Columbine, Dustin Harrison says that Harris and Klebold did bowl.
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:Lx6D3eySy6AC:www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/04/22/columbine/+harris+and+klebold+bowling&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
So right now we need more information. I couldn’t find anything else about police saying they didn’t go bowling. And the Salon was the only article that had this Harrison kid in it.
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20021119.html
http://www.spinsanity.org/post.html?2002_11_24_archive.html#85712328
Michael Moore is to the left as Rush Limbaugh is to the right. They’re political entertainers. They don’t make documentaries, they make entertainment.
Well I screwed the second link up.
I’m just sorry Charlton Heston didn’t stand up for the NRA’s actions. When Moore asked him about the NRA holding scheduled rallies a day or two after the Columbine massacre and another school shooting, saying things like “Don’t you think that was insensitive?” and “Shouldn’t they (or you) apologize?”, Heston should have turned right around and said:
“No, those rallies were even more necessary in the wake of those school shootings. Even before the bodies had grown cold, alarmists were screaming that these tragedies were all the fault of the guns. Not the fault of the kids who did the shooting, or the school, or the culture, but solely and entirely the fault of the tools those kids happened to choose as their weapons of mass murder. At times like that, the NRA needs to get its message out more than ever.”
But nooooooo, Heston wimped out and waffled. Hmph. What a politician.
Yeah, that kindergartner who shot the little girl in Michigan could have done it just as easily with a knife. How dare anyone get outraged about the tool he chose to kill her with?
:rolleyes:
Actually, tracer, in the immediate aftermath of the massacre the media was very quick to blame videogames and Marilyn Manson rather than guns.
Okay i don’t want this to turn into some pro/anti-guncontrol post. It is quite disappointing to think that anyone (of whatever political hue) making a factual piece would be sloppy with research. I am broadly speaking left-wing (though i think that means different things in different regions of the world) and it really annoys me that Moore would make such a fine bit of entertainment without backing it up with solid evidence etc.
Well i’ll stop grumbling,
Mogiaw
Also the bit where he goes into the bank in Michigan and walks out with a gun was setup. The bank does do that but they arrange for you to get the gun at the store, or somethng like that. You don’t actually walk out with the gun after opening the account that day.
I didn’t see it, I only read about this part of it in a local paper.
I took issue with Moore’s presentation of Canada as this idyllic wonderland where people of all colours are accepted unhesitatingly, doors are always left unlocked, and [cheesy superhero voice] guns are only used for the forces of good! [/cheesy superhero voice]
IIRC, Moore interviews a slack-jawed Windsor police officer who states that he can only remember there being one murder in Windsor in the past three years. Being from a similarly-sized Canadian city with a much higher rate of homicide than what Moore presents in Bowling For Columbine, I thought I’d check the stats on Windsor. And check it out: this site shows that Windsor, over the course of the 1990’s, averaged seven homicides per year. In 2000, they had six. Which made me wonder how many police officers Moore interviewed before he found the yokel with the shoddy memory who would support his argument.
Same thing with the unlocked doors. How many houses did Moore encounter that were locked and, subsequently, didn’t make it into the film?
These rhetorical strategies sort of distressed me. If Moore can paint Canada in such an exaggerated, one-dimesional manner, what’s preventing him from doing the same for the situation in the U.S.?
They still should be called on their bullshit, IMO. I always hated that “their entertainers” copout, that’s no excuse for lying.
But it is a good excuse to take anything they say with a grain of salt.
I am interested to see if these facts check out, though.
Well Tracer, Heston’s lack of response may have more to do with his Alzheimer’s Disease than anything else.
Saw the movie tonight. I thought it was entertaining. While it may not be factually correct 100%, it does put a new light (at least to me) on the gun debate. Well, the violence debate, rather. It made me think, something which the usual (read: recently WAY too patriotic) US media doesn’t achieve when topics like violence and terrorism are involved.
Heston came across as a total windbag, though. Not only did he refuse to respond to Moore’s questions about the timing of the NRA rallies in Columbine and Flint, he also insinuated that gunrelated homicides are higher in the US because of the greater ethnical diversity. When pressed to elaborate on that, he weaseled and squirmed. To me, it was obvious what he meant. What a jackass.
Wrong. Employees of the bank tell Moore, on camera, that they have “hundreds” of guns in their vault and that the bank itself is a licensed gun dealer. We see Moore fill out some paperwork and then a gun is brought to him from the vault. What you read in your local paper is a load of crap. Forbes tried to run a hatchet piece on Moore and the movie, but most of the claims in the Forbes have since proven to be largely fraudulent.
Diogenes, Moore IS known for making silly claims, and on more than a few occasions has repeated, as fact, urban legends and inaccurate information he got off the Internet. If it’s your position that Forbes is full of it, could you provide examples?
Okay…if Michael Moore didn’t pick up the gun at the bank that day, how do you explain the fact he is filmed wandering around the bank with the gun? Do they let people with guns just waltz in? Seemed pretty obvious he got it from the bank, the woman informed him they were a licensed gun dealership.
Did I miss something? Was this film presented as a documentary? Something factually correct? Or as an exageration to illustrate Moore’s political point, I.E. a comedy? The latter, I think.
I saw factual errors. But it was certainly entertaining, and made me questions some stuff.
BTW, did it seem to anyone else that Charlto Heston was begining to sound a bit racist, then realized how it may come across and started to backpeddle? Or is that just me?
This hits the nail on the head. While I agree more with Moore’s opinions than I do with Limbaugh’s, I try to view both men’s work with skepticism. Viewers should learn the difference between slickness and truth.
I have no doubts that if Heston had presented an articulate and factual defense of the NRA’s position, Moore would have left it out of his film. In the same manner, you’ll never see Hillary Clinton being given a fair opportunity to speak on her own behalf on Rush Limbaugh’s show.
I didn’t see the movie, and I am no fan of the NRA, but to say there were "NRA “rallies” in Colorado right after Columbine is a gross distortion of the facts. The NRA had their national convention scheduled in Denver the week after the shootings. A convention of this size would have been planned about 5 years in advance.