Saturday, July 24, 2010
Bowlig for Columbine
Bowling For Columbine does not take a vehemently anti-gun position, which surprised me. Michael Moore correctly points out that these are merely a means of violent people's terrible behavior. What also shocked me, given his driven search to discover why America has so many more gun deaths than say, Canada or the United Kingdom, is that he fails to consider that we have 304 million people to their 33 and 60 million, respectively, according to such sites as nationmaster.com and nationsonline.org. If our population is 9 times higher than Canada's, it stands to reason our gun deaths would be many times higher as well. Moore seems merely to be laying the way to suggest that poverty and welfare to work programs are a huge factor in gun violence, which they probably are. However, the surest remedy to poverty is education and good jobs. Endless handouts and forced dependence on the government won’t work any better for our people than they did the USSR's. I agree with the film's sentiments that no one is well served by mothers spending long hours away from home on a welfare to work program, but they most definitely should be receiving valuable job training and actively seeking employment. The purpose of social welfare should be to elevate people above their present circumstances, not to keep them in low level jobs and dependent on taxpayers so that men like Michael Moore can feel they're being compassionate because they want to give them other people's money. Unfortunately, he seems horrified at the idea anybody be forced to work, again failing to consider that if the many Americans struggling to make ends meet, often without assistance, decide to claim their "human right" of public support, our economy would grind to a halt and there would be little means for any programs. Perhaps more consideration should be paid towards them than people only interested in what they can get out of the system. Instead of attacking companies for senseless tragedies, Michael Moore should have appealed to them to open more operations in the United States, and offering employees better education and training, so that not just more, but better jobs would open, and truly break the cycle of poverty for many Americans.
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3 comments:
I don't feel that poverty was the entire aspect of the movie. Rich people kill just like poor people. And yes I feel if the parents were around there children more, teaching them right from wrong, this would have helped.I feel that Moore is somewhat of an anti gun person. He just wanted the movie to show he had a neutral side on the whole gun issue. Unfortunately he didn't show that when he and 2 victims from Columbine went to Kmart and got them to pull the ammunition off the shelves. Just because thats where the ammunition was bought.
I agree with the fact that we have a higher population, But he also compared America to Japan. It wasn't just the smaller countries. Even countries like Canada and the UK had more murders-by-guns than even Japan. I don't agree with the fact that population has anything to do with it.
The countries compared in the film, I found the statistics of gun related deaths the most interesting. Even though, America has a larger population then most of the countries referred too, they are more dense in population. Smaller countries like Germany are much more crowded, than the United States. America could grow in population by millions and still be not nearly as crowed as Germany is today. You would think that having more people in a smaller space would lead to more crime.
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