Film Description
A head-shaking, jaw-dropping but also very funny look at America's obsession with gun ownership, characterised by Moore's desire to delve a little further than most into some uncomfortable but very necessary questions.
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By andrew hoellering on 7th May 2003
This fine documentary starts with director/interviewer Michael Moore asking a bank clerk why her bank hands out a free gun with every new account , and it concludes wi... more >
This fine documentary starts with director/interviewer Michael Moore asking a bank clerk why her bank hands out a free gun with every new account , and it concludes with genuine insights into the present all-American malaise of which this is a symptom.
The title is a metaphor. The two boys who killed 12 fellow students at Columbine High School practiced bowling in the morning before going on to commit their crime in the afternoon. Likewise the film implies that the American obsession with ownership of guns as playthings will lead to an increasing number of tragedies along the lines of both Columbine and Flint . Given the strength of the National Rifle Association gun lobby, the implication is that there is little anyone can do about it.
Moore focuses on the NRA’s president, Charlton Heston as he arrives after each school tragedy to blithely assure the faithful that all is well. His reassurances are intercut with the gloomy prognostications of parents who have lost their children, and the ironic conclusion comes in a superb confrontation between Heston and Moore (himself, incidentally, a lifelong NRA member.)
Billy Wilder said that while a director may spell out two plus two, he should leave his audience to draw its own conclusion. Moore does this while asking important questions –for instance, why does Canada, with the same number of guns as the States, have an average of fewer than 100 shootings a year compared with the 11,000 odd in the Union? The lax gun laws in the States, its tendency to bomb foreign countries if it disapproves of their regimes (witness Iraq); its media’s obsession with reporting violent crimes,and its tendency to demonise Afro-Americans - all can be cited by way of explanation.
As the hysteria over the threat from terrorists –real and imagined –increases, so Americans are rushing to buy more and more guns and ammunition. At the same time we note the ongoing erosion of civil rights and individual freedoms.
Does the root of the crisis lie in America’s crucial failure to connect between killing innocent civilians abroad and at home ? Or is it more mundane – in the right of all Americans under the constitution not merely to possess firearms but use them in defence of their families? Or did FDR get it right when he warned, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself ”?
This superb documentary surprises and astonishes as it presents its evidence, whilst firmly leaving us to draw our own conclusions. Its casual, relaxed style and humour can be misleading. It is not to be missed.
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