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The documentary, Bowling for Columbine, is a strongly deceptive film which portrays America as a cruel, violent country. Although considered as an Academy Award Winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine fictionally depicts “gun violence” in the U.S; in reality gun violence is prevalent world wide. Guns are used for a multitude of reasons, not only violence towards others; It is ultimately the result of one’s personal actions and decisions. Regardless of the weapon, the person who uses it is responsible. In the documentary, Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore provides a false perception of the overuse of guns in America, and deceives the viewers with angry humor and misleading examples.
Michael Moore should win an award for being the most
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deceitful man of the decade. He carefully and prestigiously pieced together a one-sided video—- which failed to display factual data or reliable interview sources. He purposely designed the documentary to capture the audiences attention and to win over the opinions of those who view it. Within the documentary, Michael Moore depicted America as a fearful and cut-throat place, due to the accessibility/overuse of guns and it’s violent history. Which is absolutely incorrect—due to the fact that America is the most highly looked upon country in the global society. He even attempted to relate our military’s weapons to the weapons that were used in the Columbine Massacre—which has no correlation what so ever. Yet, Michael Moore failed to mention America’s military power, in comparison to other countries. The U.S.’s Military name hold the reputation of ‘The most powerful military in the world’. Michael Moore did not allude to the many children of American Military troops, who look up to and honor their parents for defending our country; The children do not focus their attention on the weapons their parents use. Michael Moore completely disrespected the Military involved families in America, by applying that the weapons the U.S. Army Arsenal produce, prompts kids to do unspeakable things such as the Columbine massacre. In turn, what kind of message does that relay to the kids of our American Military?—An extremely offensive one. The Columbine massacre was committed by two boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, of whom were current seniors at Columbine high school.
Regardless of the weapon they used, they had the nerve to walk into a quiet high school on April 20th, 1999, and murder 13 people; not to mention injure 21 other innocent teenagers. Whether these ruthless boys used bombs, knives, rocks, or guns—-they were mentally distraught enough to go through with what they did; Reason being, Eric and Dylan immediately committed suicide after doing such an awful deed to all of those blameless students. Guns are not the problem, utterly sick and irrational people are. Michael Moore used two gentlemen who were injured in the Columbine Massacre to manipulate, and ‘guilt trip’ an innocent company. He unspokenly blamed K-MART for the Columbine Massacre— only because they sold ammunition in their stores at the time of the massacre. Which does not make any logical sense what so ever. The killers were so twisted that they would have bought ammunition from anywhere, not just K-MART. As an end result in the documentary, K-MART had no choice than to do what Michael Moore asked for, only out of pity and respect for the handicapped young men he drug with him. This is one of the many deceitful actions committed within the documentary, Bowling For
Columbine. Massacre(n) -The indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of people. In the English dictionary, A ‘Massacre’ does not have the same definition as a ‘Shooting’; Although the killers of the Columbine Massacre used guns to end the lives of 12 students, the bottom line is the students were indiscriminately and brutally murdered—no matter the weapon. In the documentary, Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore falsely displays the use of guns in America, and thoroughly deceives the audience with misleading examples. Growing up in the south I, personally, am around guns all of the time. I relate guns to hunting and safety; I know there are awful people out there that use them for violence, but bottom line is they are used for MORE than just cruelty. The problem with ‘gun violence’ can be found in the heart and mind of the person who holds the gun itself. Our fast-moving and vivid society promotes a treacherous and viscous image. You will find lies plastered on billboards, within the lyrics of popular songs, and on the channels of T.V.; We cannot allow ourselves to believe them. Only you can decipher what is right and wrong—- A gun does make that decision for you.
"Columbine High School Shootings." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 08 Sept. 2015. Eighteen year old Eric Harris and seventeen year old Dylan Klebold were two boys with a fascination of violent video games and music. These young men were known to be “goth” and were bullied all throughout their high school careers because of their different interest. In 1999, on April 20th these boys went into their high school with mixed emotions and a devious plan to get revenge. The two teens went into the high school with handguns and killed both students and faculty members, before they turned the guns around on themselves. This is a reliable source because it informed us of both previous emotion, and the aftermath of the tragedy with detail about the boys, the school and the lives affected. This source was relevant for me because of how thoroughly it described the shooting, and gave me background information as to why and how it happened.
In the documentary “Bowling for Columbine” directed by Michael Moore there are two scenes that share the same idea of questioning the laws they have in the U.S.A. The first documentary that captivated my attention was the Columbine High School massacre, where Michael Moore examines the culture of guns and violence in America. He used archival footage, camera techniques and sound to give authenticity and strength to the disturbing event. Michael Moore uses specific techniques enabling the audience to empathize with the survivors and their loved ones in order for the viewers to feel their emotions. Graphics are used to first establish the scene of the Columbine shooting, “one hour later” appears on the black screen with white lettering, readying
In the cases of school shootings that took place at Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary, Virginia Tech University and Northern Illinois University, the media highly publicized the fact that the perpetrators were avid video gamers, but why is this important? The media want’s your attention and they are more than willing to say almost anything to get it. They reported that the perpetrators were avid gamers with the implication that there is a well establish connection between the two when there is not. They exploit the fear of parents and concerned citizens by not including relevant corresponding information in order to leave you more interested lea...
But Harris and Klebold planned for a year and dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life. Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by resentment of them in particular. Students and teachers were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as "collateral damage."” Harris and Klebold could’ve chosen any place to stage their bombing as it wasn’t about the school. The school had absolutely nothing to do with their intentions, it was just an opportunity to do what they dreamed of doing. They had no intention of starting a school shooting as was stated in the same article as above, “The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale…. It wasn 't just "fame" they were after… they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.”
In American society, violence runs rampage throughout the country that cause its citizens to be afraid and discouraged about their homeland. One of the major parts of American violence is from guns. In the documentary, "Bowling for Columbine", a famous filmmaker, Michael Moore addresses the ubiquitous situation in America. He argues that the use of gun in America co-insides or correlates to the recent massacres and that America, as a whole, should have stricter gun control laws. Throughout the film, Moore uses specific references to it and employs rhetorical and persuasive devices to construct his argument in favor of changing gun laws.
The Techniques of Michael Moore in Bowling For Columbine to Present the Message on Gun Control
The columbine massacre the day where no one is safe in school or out of school. The columbine massacre is about two students named Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris both seniors 17 years old both two weeks before graduating they killed 12 students, one teacher, and 21 injured to their shooting on April 20, 1999. Both Dylan and Eric were some believe they were bullied by the sport teams in their school so they planned to kill the people who bullied them and other mostly anyone who gets in their way but that wasn’t really why the FBI he said that there target was everyone no one in pacify we will not get in to more details now. Dylan and Eric were both intelligent boys with solid parents and a good home and both had brothers younger than them. They played soccer, baseball, and both enjoyed to work on computers. Both boys were thinking on commit suicide on 1997 but instead started to plan a massacre in 1998 a year before it happened. Then the two boys had got into some trouble for breaking into a van on January 30, 1998 trying to steal some fuses and wires for bombs for them to make, but they got caught in trouble. So the court put them in a program called the juvenile diversion program, but even if they were there they were still planning the massacre and the court also put Eric in some angry management classes and people believe it worked but it didn’t he just did it to look like it work and both boys made it look like they were really sorry but they weren’t. Dylan and Eric both really hated everyone in their school and the court as well after they got caught breaking in to that van that’s when they really started to plan the massacre more and that’s when Harris started he’s journals no one really knows way but they didn’t hate a hand...
On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old college student, shocked the nation when he perpetrated the deadliest shooting massacre in U.S. history. The violent rampage took place on the Virginia Tech University campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Cho was a senior majoring in English. Before turning the gun on himself and delivering a fatal gunshot to the head, Cho murdered more than 30 of his classmates and University faculty; numerous others were injured. In a strange twist, several days after the tragedy, a package determined to have been mailed by Cho during the shooting spree was received at NBC News in New York. The package contained photos of Cho posing with guns, as well as video clips and various pages of Cho’s writing. Portraying himself as a martyr avenger of the weak and defenseless, the targets of Cho’s angry ranting included wealthy students, bullies, Christianity, and society (Kleinfield, 2007). In the wake of tragedies like Virginia Tech, an automatic public response is to want immediate answers, explanations. It seems logical that something so extraordinarily awful and wrong must have been caused by an equally unusual and outrageous problem or anomaly. However, explaining heinous crimes of violence is not so straight-forward; understanding violent behavior involves multiple, and sometimes conflicting, theoretical perspectives and disciplines.
On December 14th 2012, just 11 days before Christmas, an awful tragedy happened in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people were shot at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. This awful event left a lot of unanswered questions and rumors about that day. The reason for that is because the shooter killed himself after shooting twenty young children and six adults. This tragedy open the eyes of everyone; made you want to hug your loves one just a little tighter, appreciate what you still have and never take a day for granted. Even our president Barack Obama felt the pain of all those who lost their loved ones in this event. He insured everyone that he will do everything in his power to make sure a tragedy like this will not happen again. However, did you know that there have been over 44 school shootings since the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary shooting? I know as a future teacher and mother I want to make sure my children are safe in this world and even at school. I want to be able to make a difference in this issue and have some knowledge to have I can do that. The society should understand what really happen during the Sandy Hook event, the reasons behind why school shootings/violence are rapidly increasing each year, and have some knowledge about what we, as a society, can do to help in order for us to start seeing a decrease of these events.
When 2 young men, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a shooting spree in Littleton, Colorado, killing 15 people, including themselves, there was a public outcry for censorship of every type of entertainment and changes in gun laws despite Eric Harris’s journal entry titled, “Last Wishes” asking that no one be blamed, other than himself and Klebold, for the massacre (“As You Were”, par. 2). After the 1999 school shooting now simply known as Columbine, a “Newsweek” pole showed that, “about half of all Americans want to see the movie industry, the TV industry, computer game makers, Internet services and gun manufacturers and the NRA make major policy changes to help reduce teen violence” (Alter, par. 1). According to Dave Cullen in his article “Let the Litigation Begin” several lawsuits were filed against the parents of the two boys responsible for the shooting spree claiming that Harris’s and Klebold’s families, “breached their duty of care” by allowing their sons to amass a cache of illegal weapons (Cullen, par. 5). Although the boys’ parents denied such allegations, they settled out of court for $1.6 million (Cullen, par. 5)...
The United States will not soon forget the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut that came just two weeks before Christmas last year. This tragic event resulted in the death of twenty students and eight adults. Although the event shocked the nation, rampage shootings are nothing new. Over the years, many families have lost loved ones to these horrific events. As a result, these mass shootings such as the one that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary caught public attention leading to a push to find the cause of these events. Out of this research a variety of possible causes came to light consisting of arguments stating that high school bullying, availability of guns, mental illness, violent movies and video games are the cause of mass shootings. However, these researchers and debaters tend to ignore the role of massive media coverage in the increase of copycat shootings in the United States.
I believe that one theme of this book is, that you should always watch what you say, how you
It Deprived parents from seeing their loved ones. "Moore introduces us to two of the students wounded at Columbine, both still with bullets in their bodies. He explains that all of the Columbine bullets were freely sold to the teenage killers by Kmart, at 17 cents apiece. And then he takes the two victims to Kmart headquarters to return the bullets for a refund"(Bowling for Columbine Movie). Actually, Moore showed us these two students in order to bring our attention to a public to have enough knowledge about how people with suicidal thoughts react. I think Moore wanted also to display facts about the huge tragedy that the Bowling for Columbine High school went through, and he also provided his movie with a clip from the shooting video and how the horrible was the situation of the students and they looked
In 2013, research conducted by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) defined public mass shootings as events that happened in a public place where four or more people were injured or died as a result of gunfire. CRS also argued that the gunman typically selected their victims at random. J. Harris and R. Harris (2012) referred to public mass shootings as rampage violence. Ironically, following each tragic public mass shooting identified above, there were spirited debates about gun control among political pundits, government officials and the American people, deliberations on the influence of media and entertainment glorifying violence, gaps in mental health services and a commitment to address the problem but to no avail. With no progress made on addressing public mass shootings, it was concluded that current research on mass violence has been ineffective and required some modification (J. Harris & R. Harris, 2012).
With the media shining so much light upon this topic, it is evident that mass murders in the United States of America are more frequent and deadly. In fact, studies have found that the USA has more mass public shootings than any other country (Christensen). These numbers have only been increasing in the past decades. This is shocking because the USA holds only 5 percent of the world’s population, but as a nation, contributes to 31 percent of mass murders (Christensen). Although these murders continue to be a rare phenomenon, weak gun laws, the need for fame, and issues with societal views are the main causes of the increase in cases.