7 December 2003 - Bowling for Columbine

The following is a copy on an email I just sent to the film maker Michael Moore:

Dear Mike,

Last night Bowling for Columbine was shown on national TV here in the UK. I am sure you will have many comments. I hope you will find this one worth reading.

My overall impression is that you asked some very important questions and highlighted some very important distinctions, in particular between Canada and the USA. However, instead of following these through to bring the USA into an intelligent debate about how the USA could become a safer place by putting more attention into social justice and wealth redistribution to the weakest and most vulnerable, you went down a path of blaming the bullets on sale in K-mart. How easy is it to buy bullets in Canada? After having established that guns are not the problem by comparing the USA with Canada, you then went on to squarely and solely focus on guns as the problem. Why?

You really missed a golden opportunity. Instead of seeking a discovery which all would agree on because you can prove it, you perpetuated a dialogue of the deaf and simply fuelled the fires of the pro-gun and anti-gun lobbies' arguments. Maybe this has made your film more exciting and created more heated discussions, but unfortunately this is precisely the problem. In the USA people often get all emotional and self righteous and when that happens, all thinking about the problem stops. All that is then said about the problem is “you are a nasty bad person: You are the problem”. This attitude is the problem and you have shown in a quite revealing film that you are very much part of that problem. You are to blame. Ah!!  Now you’ve got me doing it!!!! ;-)

No. You are not the problem. You are just soaked in the culture that has this problem. I think your meeting with Charlton Heston captures the best and worst aspects of the film. You start off well, asking profound and subtle questions. But it soon degrades into “blamestorming”. It may make popular television, but does it solve the problem?

If you want to stop this cancer in US culture, then please change the way you work. Not every problem needs to be seen as a conflict. This is an attitude we need to fight against!

Love your enemy. Or at least try to listen to him a bit more.

Warmest regards,

Lamaan Ball