Bowling For Columbine Argument Essay

The documentary “Bowling for Columbine” by Michael Moore discusses the shooting at Columbine Highschool in April of 1999. While going into the details of the shooting, Moore aims to answer why gun violence and mass shootings are so prevalent in the United States compared to other countries. Despite how the arguments that Moore makes are backed up with statistics and results, the documentary still falls short of being a fully effective argument due to one logical fallacy.

The main point of Michael Moore’s documentary ‘Bowling for Columbine” is to attempt to answer why gun deaths in the United States are much higher compared to other countries and regions including the United Kingdom, France, and Japan. Moore travels to various locations in

North America to gather statistics and learn about the various tragedies that occurred. One of the tragedies that occurs is the murder of Kayla Rolland; a six-year-old shoots Kayla because he does not like her.

The sequence of events that Moore discovers starts with the shooter’s mother being evicted from her house; the pair move in with their uncle, the child finds a gun and takes it, all leading up to the shooting. This order of events uses the logical fallacy slippery slope, a small step leads to series of events that ultimately creates a catastrophic result. Slippery slope in play is that evictions lead to shootings, while this fallacy generally can weaken an argument, this one does not due to the fact that Moore was just gathering a series of events and putting them together and never stating one event will normally lead to a murder. While traveling throughout North America, Moore’s documentary does its share of traveling with its storytelling. The documentary goes in many directions at the start; including the opening scenes at the

bank where Moore gets a free rifle for opening an account with them and the history of U.S. incited incidents. These segments are guilty of the fallacy red herring, going off in irrelevant directions with regards to an argument. The red herring, like the slippery slope mentioned earlier, does not degrade the argument that Moore makes since most of it is shown earlier in the documentary and before Moore concludes that fear is the reason that is behind the U.S. gun death rate.
Moore’s documentary also includes a short cartoon about the history of U.S.

and ties in how guns and fear factor in. The cartoon in short, describes the history of the U.S. from the British sailing to the new world to the civil rights movement while implying that whites are afraid of everything unless they have guns and African-Americans are quite peaceful and forgiving. The entire cartoon contains the fallacy of Hasty Generalization, jumping to conclusions without sufficient evidence. Moore’s cartoon assumes that whites are afraid of everything and everyone, including each other, when some whites may just simply be angry or hateful. African-Americans in the cartoon are assumed to be peaceful and relaxed once they gained their freedom, some of them still wanted vengeance against their slave owners after gaining freedom. The cartoon segment’s purpose was to show how a nation of fear leads to rampant fatal shootings, however, due to the blatant generalization and the historical inaccuracies, this argument does lose a great deal of

credibility.
Michael Moore’s main claim is that fear is the reason why gun violence in the U.S. is much more common than in other countries. Moore supports his argument by making a list of potential candidates for why shootings in the U.S. occur and tosses them due to other countries that contradict each claim. The list includes goth culture, violent games and movies, and even the violent history that the U.S. has; however, Germany contradicts goth culture and France violent movies since gun deaths per 100,000 are only a few hundred. Japan contradicts games since they create the games and their death toll is in double digits; finally, all the aforementioned countries have violent history. Moore eventually reaches the conclusion, after seeing the Canadian news, that fear is why the U.S. has many more gun related deaths. After reaching this conclusion, Moore tries to condense it into a cartoon that assumes too much and makes errors in American History. While Moore was interviewing key individuals, the one time where he really had to handle opposing opinion was with Charlton Heston. In the end of the documentary, Moore visits Heston and asks him why the gun murder rate is very high; eventually, after Moore contradicts some of his arguments and asks about the National Rifle Association rallys, Heston walks out on Moore and refuses to answer questions; Moore attempts to continue the conversation but Heston is finished.
Michael Moore travels across the United States and Canada to gain knowledge about gun violence to answer why gun related deaths in the U.S. are very common. The argument he makes falls short of effective due to a major fallacy. Overall, the documentary falls short of a successful argument due to the hasty generalization he makes about Whites and fear.