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Moore wants to know why more than ten thousand people each year are killed by guns in the United States. Is it because there is no effective gun control? But there's plenty of guns in Canada, where gun killing is minimal. Is it because America has a violent history? But so does Germany, where gun deaths are low. Is it due to wealth inequality? Racial groups?
Moore gradually introduces the plausible answer: fear. Where fear is high, gun deaths follow. Fear is promoted by television, such as "Cops" and the violence-hungry news media. It is also pushed by the Bush administration and their terror alerts, e.g. "today's threat level is orange." After all, Bush probably won re-election in 2004 due to successfully encouraging the belief among the logic-challenged that only Republicans could keep democracy safe.
Although the film is peripherally about the sensational school shooting at Columbine (near Littleton, Colorado), only a relatively small portion of the film focuses on that tragedy. Nonetheless, there is chilling surveillance camera footage of the killers patrolling the cafeteria, and panicked 9-1-1 calls from teachers are also included. For good measure, Moore throws in carefully edited clips of horrifying gun violence ripe for the Faces of Death video series.
But much of the documentary is curiously lighthearted. National Rifle Association promotional films and toy gun advertisements from half a century ago are shown for their unintentional humor. An outrageous cartoon is inserted that purports to be the American history of gun violence, but mostly satirizes white fear and oppression of blacks and Indians.
How others will see it. Bowling for Columbine was well-received at Cannes, which indicates one thing. The French cinema hangers-on enjoy watching left-wing documentaries that make America look bad. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
How I felt about it. Back in the day, people would joke that you knew your company had jumped the shark when a "60 Minutes" television crew showed up for an interview. Nobody seems to fear that newsmagazine anymore, but right-wing celebrities and corporations have a new enemy: Michael Moore.
Moore made his reputation as a gadfly in 1989 with a very good satire, Roger and Me, which had a running gag of Moore trying to interview the CEO of General Motors. GM was cutting jobs in Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan, causing a virtual death spiral to the local economy. Naturally, this concerned Moore, who knew that Union assembly line jobs were being replaced by minimum wage part-time work at Taco Bell.
Moore knows that such jobs can't pay the bills, and lead to widespread economic despair. In Bowling for Columbine, the theme rises again. President Clinton's welfare reform program, while politically popular, forced single mothers to work minimum wage jobs distant from their ghetto community, leaving young children unattended. A six year old boy brought a gun to school, and shot and killed a schoolmate. This tragedy is also blamed (through classic Moore gadfly logic) on Charlton Heston, a noted gun ownership advocate and NRA head who had the temerity to hold a rally in Flint just a few days later.
Antagonistic interviews of Heston and Dick Clark aren't meant to be revealing. They are played up for the camera, and the viewer is expected to applaud Moore's revelation of the interviewees indifference to the human suffering he is (per Moore) partly responsible for. Clark should pay his restaurant staff high wages instead? And remain competitive exactly how?
Moore can be misleading in his efforts to reveal the undercurrents of American social problems. The infamous Willy Horton ad, linked to the 1988 Presidential campaign of the senior Bush, has its racism and white fear enhanced by the misrepresentation of its contents. Notoriously, it is implied that the Stone-Parker masterminds behind "South Park" also made the cartoon short about the history of American guns. And it turns out that the Columbine school shooters didn't attend bowling class before the massacre. Well, facts can be pesky and just get in the way sometimes.