Response to Bowling Fror Columbine

499 Words2 Pages
15 years have passed since the infamous “Columbine High School Massacre” of 1999, where two secluded high school seniors murdered 12 students and 1 high school teacher. This tragic event , and the death of 30 000 other people due to gun violence each year, sparked a large debate over gun control laws in the US which still exists to this day and seems unlikely to simmer-down any time soon. In In the critically acclaimed documentary “Bowling For Columbine”, Michael Moore explores the roots of Americans fascination of guns. This documentary can easily be viewed as fully objective as Moore does not choose sides between gun control or civil rights, but instead tackles what is the cause of such fondness of this awful culture. This documentary heavily revolves around the idea that the main cause of gun violence in America is due to so many American’s being immersed in a culture of fear. This matter is brought up by Rock Artist Marilyn Manson whos music was targeted by the media in the wake of The Columbine Massacre as a cause of the mass shooting. “It’s a campaign of fear and consumption” says Manson, “Keep the people scared and they will consume”. Moore seems to agree as he plays a montage of TV news headlines that blast viewers with images of crime after crime. This shows the viewer how Americans are not being shown the more important news story’s when a clip reveals “new speedbumps” being setup in a peaceful town in Canada. The title of the documentary refers to the story that the shooters of the massacre attented a school bowling class at 6 AM on the day they committed the attacks. He marvellously uses this idea to suggest that bowling could have been just as responsible for the attacks as Marilyn Manson, or even President Bill Clinton, who launched bombing attacks on Serbia at the time. Moore uses a comical short of how was America built on fear, first of
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