Bowling for Columbine
Many of the factual problems with the film have already been addressed (e.g. by Spinsanity's Ben Fritz here and here). But there's one side I haven't seen covered and I think it's worth discussing.
One of the tenets of Bowling for Columbine is that Canada has about the same level of gun ownership as the US. Based on the statistics I found, this is not true. According to a Justice Canada document (taken from the 1996 International Crime Victim Survey), gun ownership in Canada by household is about half of what it is in the US:
Nearly 22% of Canadian households possessed at least one firearm. Possession was highest in the United States (48.6%) and lowest in England and Wales, Scotland, and the Netherlands.
Canadians also tend to own rifles rather than handguns, and gun ownership tends to correlate with rural living (i.e. a smaller proportion of people in cities own guns). From the Coalition for Gun Control we also find this interesting fact:
Canada has roughly 1 million handguns while the United States has more than 76 million. While there are other factors affecting murder, suicide and unintentional injury rates, a comparison of data in Canada and the United States suggests that access to handguns may play a role. While the murder rate without guns in the US is roughly equivalent (1.8 times) to that of Canada, the murder rate with handguns is 14.5 times the Canadian rate. [Emphasis in the original]
These facts were presumably available to Moore, if he'd looked for them. The problem is they undermine his points about the culture of fear and media-fuelled paranoia. The reason so many Americans die from guns may simply be that there are way too many guns in the US. And consequently Americans might be scared of each other because their chances of encountering someone who is armed and hostile are actually pretty good. In other words, Moore's thesis might be precisely inverted.
But anyway, gun control doesn't make for such an interesting movie.
Also, and nothing to do with the points above, I thought the segment on killer bees migrating north ("Africanized" Bees--"not the friendly European bees we're used to") was brilliant. It nicely illustrated the fear mongering and subtle racism that seems to pervade the media--punctuating two of Moore's arguments at once.
