Bowling for Columbine Reviews

Filmmaker and social critic Michael Moore takes aim at America's love of deadly firearms and hits a much wider target: the culture of fear he feels keeps gun owners on edge and their weapons locked and loaded. The title is a wry reference to the report that teenage shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went bowling shortly before they entered Columbine High School and, in the deadliest school massacre in U.S. history, systematically murdered 15 people. Columbine has become a rallying point for gun control advocates around the country, but in the media's rush to lay blame, Moore wonders impishly why bowling wasn't cited as a pernicious influence on our nation's youth. Riotously funny and deadly serious, Moore's two-hour documentary probes the received wisdom that prevalence of guns is solely responsible for the staggering number of gun-related deaths in the United States. Canadians are avid hunters with a similarly high gun-to-citizen ratio, but suffer few shooting deaths; what is it about America that makes us point our guns at each other? Moore uses a perceptive comment made by Marilyn Manson — whose influence was blamed for what happened at Columbine — about how a fearful citizenry makes a good consumer base, to introduce Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. Glassner argues that the news media creates an atmosphere of generalized terror by reporting isolated incidents as if they were threatening trends and keeps a nervous — and armed — public scared of everything from "Africanized" killer bees to African Americans. It's an interesting theory, but Moore knows it can't explain why one 6-year-old shot another in a Flint, Mich., elementary school — he lays blame for that at the door of the welfare-to-work program — or why Harris and Klebold took their weapons to school that day; his general point becomes somewhat muddled amid all the speculation. And while you might not cotton to Moore's guerrilla approach of ambushing interview subjects with a mike and camera (he goes after Dick Clark and, in a real coup, NRA president Charlton Heston), but it got K-Mart to pull handgun and assault ammunition from their shelves after two Columbine survivors show up at corporate headquarters with Moore's camera crew in tow and bullets bought for 13 cents apiece at a K-Mart store still embedded in their bodies.