Bowling for Columbine Review by Lillo

In the movie Bowling for Columbine, Micheal Moore tries to figure out why America’s culture is more violent than many other places including countries Canada, Australia, and Japan. Moore shows this perspective he has of why America is more violent, by accusing the media or news of scaring the American people over small threats including the “Killer Bees” epidemic.

I think this is a great movie because Moore gets his point across that in other places other than America, people are more friendly and less scared of their surrounding environment. In an example from the movie, when Moore travels to Canada, he interviews many Canadians and asks them various questions. One common question he asks all of them is if they lock their door at night. Every single person who answered this question said “no.” When Moore asked the people the reason for this they responded simply because, “we’re not afraid of our neighbors.”

Moore does some field work while in Canada, and tries to open several random house doors. Every door he tries to open is unlocked. One of the doors he opens has a house owner behind it. To Moore’s surprise the owner of the house is not alarmed at Moore opening the door but more friendly than expected, willing to have a conversation with a total stranger.

In the movie some statistics are shown about the number of people killed by guns in different countries.

1. United States - 11,127 (3.601/100,000)
2. Germany – 381 (0.466/100,000)
3. France – 255 (0.389/100,000)
4. Canada – 165 (0.484/100,000)
5. United Kingdom – 68 (0.109/100,000)
6. Australia – 65 (0.292/100,000)
7. Japan – 39 (0.030/100,000)

You can see that the U.S’s death rate from guns exceeds all other countries mentioned by almost 10,000. This shows that the U.S is a more dangerous place than all these other countries, but some countries statistics aren’t shown. Many places are more dangerous than the U.S including Africa, Brazil and Colombia.

Firearm related death rate
1. South Africa - 74.57
2. Colombia - 51.77
3. Brazil - 14.15

United States death rate by firearms is 10.2, as you can see these three countries have a higher death rate by firearms than the U.S. Africa’s death rate is just about 7 times the U.S. This is only 3 of the countries that have higher death rates, there are more places in the world that have higher death rates. To sum it up, Moore does a great job in the way he produces and directs this movie to show the people of all the ways celebrities or politics are totally ignorant towards the common person and only care about themselves and their money. Moore shows this with his interview with Charleston Heston when he asks Heston why he held a rally for the NRA after the Columbine shooting and Heston has no other answer then to walk away from the interview and lock himself in his house.