I have previously written an article on the subject, entitled “Bowling For Columbine is shit.”, but I had not seen the film in quite some time when I wrote that and my focus was not on flaws with the documentary itself, but with the general position supported by its fans and, to some extent, Michael Moore. Thus, my title seems to have been somewhat inadequate. However, I will correct this here: I recently had to view the film and it will now be easier for me to criticise the documentary as a documentary, to explain why it really is shit.

I expect the same from documentaries as I expect from news articles. There is a certain methodology involved that is at the root of the discipline — a methodology that is known as “objectivity” — and Michael Moore could not have violated it in more conspicuous ways.

The film is indeed entertaining, spiced with his love of irony and his layman’s approach to the topic, and I did laugh on a few occasions while viewing the film, but the comedy aside, it seems like a collage of superficial looks at the issue. He will dig a bit, then see a new, amusing angle and pursue that, rather than continue to analyse what he first started elaborating upon. It makes it all very shallow.

This, however, I can deal with. What annoys me with his documentary is how it is passed for far more than it is, both by Michael Moore and his fans, and that he consistently misleads the viewers. There’s nothing too bothersome about a news article that says nothing and bores the readers, but what about one that excites and misleads them?

The context of murder statistics
One example of his penchant for this is his use of even the most simple of information. When looking at murder in other countries, after having shown that many of these countries were similar to the United States in their secularism, a bloody history and a love of violent media, he offers the number of murders committed in the country over a certain year. Interestingly enough, he does not use per capita rates and instead goes for the total number, even though he is comparing countries that vary wildly in their population size: Canada, for example, has around 33 million inhabitants, while the United States has around 306 million. Thus, one can expect the total amount of murders to be very different and it would actually be normal for the United States to have almost ten times more murders than Canada. Still, the per capita rates do show that there is a significant problem in the United States — in 2002, the year that Bowling For Columbine was released, Canada had 1.67 murders per 100 000 inhabitants while the United States had 5.6 –, but the film over-represented the difference by citing total murder rates without putting things in the context of different population sizes.

Ethnic differences
Another example is when he looks at ethnic differences between the countries: he claims that Canada has a 13% non-white population and suggests that the ethnic differences between the United States and Canada are minimal, since the United States has about that percentage of blacks. In fact, the difference is quite large, with only 2.2% of Canadians being black, and it is important to make note of the different origin and histories of the non-whites in Canada and the United States. The murder rate for African-Americans is higher than for those of European or Asian origin. In 2004, 52% of murderers were black, while they represent about 13.4% of the population. Also, the Blacks in Canada have a significantly different history to that of those in the United States; black immigrants, as noted in my previous link, are only 60% as likely to commit murder than native ones. So it is important to look at the very different demographics of both countries if we are to better understand the issue of violence, since certain ethnic groups are correlated with higher murder rates.

However, even if we cut the United State’s murder rate in half, which would be pretty much representative of a year where no murder would be committed by an African-American, it still seems that the United State’s murder rate is particularly high (2.8 as compared to Canada’s 1.67, and that’s without making the same adjustment for Canadian murder rates).

Cops
At one point, he goes to see someone involved in the creation of “Cops”, a reality television show that follows police officers on the job, often dealing with junkies and eccentric criminals. There, Michael Moore complains that it over-represents African-Americans. The fact of the matter is that African-Americans are indeed involved in more crime and if he were to reduce the number of scenes with blacks so as to be representative of the population as a whole, rather than of those who are in those situations, and then he would be distorting reality. There isn’t 13.4 blacks for every hundred people in every situation in the United States. Intentionally making it look like that, even in situations where the percentage of blacks involved is much higher, would be misleading and wrong.

Does Cops reinforce prejudice against African-Americans? Perhaps, but I would suspect that it would only have this effect in the minds of people who are already racist. Even then, I do not believe that we should shield people from the unpleasant facts of life. It’s a shame that African-Americans are more likely to commit crimes, but it is not by hiding this problem that it will go away and people need to realise that the reason racism is bad is not that there’s no difference between blacks and whites — there are indeed differences, whatever the origin of these differences may be –, but it is with other problems related to racism as an attitude or ideology.

Irrelevancies
He tends to engage in amusing comparisons that seem, on the whole, to be rather irrelevant. For example, he puts some energy in linking the fear of killer bees, (which are, he reminds us several times, also known as “Africanized” bees) and African-Americans, which he suggests are overly represented in the media as being dangerous.

Another mistake of his is his reliance on interviews with everyday people, which do make the film more amusing, but which also make it more irrelevant: a drunken woman in a bar, for example, is not much of an authority on what Canada is like and certainly not on the differences between the United States and Canada.

Then there is his obsession with Bush and the war in Iraq, which really have little to do with school shootings. I could understand why one or even two references to Bush could be considered fair game, but, by using Bush as an example on so many occasion, he gives it undue weight and creates a source of bias: he is effectively doing the same thing he criticizes the news media of doing, of being disproportionate.

Dumb arguments
Near the end of the documentary, he shoots a scene with a man who says that if more guns make people safer, then the United States would be an incredibly safe country due to its gun culture. But, because it is more dangerous than other Western countries, the argument goes on, then it must be that guns do not make a country safer. This is a flawed argument, as it ignores the possibility of other factors that could influence crime: there is little correlation between gun ownership rates and murder rates. One could build an argument of the same quality to defend the opposite position and, sadly, this goes for many of the flimsy arguments presented in the film: they are so low in quality, that they could all easily be altered so as to defend the opposite position using the same shallow patterns of logic.

The documentary is amusing, entertaining and does offer some material to think about, but its only merits are in showing the world that documentaries can be popular, even though this quite clearly comes with the message that to be popular, documentaries must be shit.

I hold to note that there are many other problems with the Bowling For Columbine documentary, errors that are far more troubling than I noted here. I suggest that people look at this page that takes a thorough look at the errors in the documentary, letting the facts speak for themselves.

EDIT: I just spoke with someone who, after watching the documentary, was left with the impression that Canadians had more guns per capita than the United States (which, if I recall, was fit in Michael Moore’s idea that the higher rate of murder was not due to guns, but due to the US-American culture). This is untrue: Canada has about a third of the firearms per capita.

-Dussault

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