Columbine Compare And Contrast

Columbine vs. Bowling for Columbine

Do you ever wonder how one thing can be made into two completely different products. In April of 1999 two high school seniors entered their school fully armed and killed 15 people including themselves in a small town in Colorado, America. There was lots of media coverage on this tragedy one of which was a non-fiction novel and another being a documentary both in which had great success. The Non-Fiction novel Columbine by Dave Cullen and documentary Bowling for Columbine by Michael Moore were both created based on the same tragedy and are both very informative yet presented in very different formats.

Although the media types of non-fiction novels and documentaries are very different they do have similarities,

Columbine the book sets information straight and informs the reader of events that took place before, during and after the shooting. “The final portrait is often furthest from the truth” says Dave Cullen. When this tragedy took place in 1999 the media was all quick to cover the story of the school shooting and the two boys who killed their classmates although most of them did not have their story straight and presented false information. Dave Cullen then spent ten years studying and learning everything that happened so he could present the public with the truth about what happened that day. This shows that the novel is not only very detailed and informative but provides corrections to previously learned facts. In Bowling for Columbine you learn a lot about gun control laws and crime rate. The documentary provides statistics about deaths from guns in different

The nonfiction novel Columbine is very focused on providing a storyline of the event on April 20th,1999. "Eric and Dylan planned to be dead shortly after the weekend, but Friday night they had a little work to do: one last shift at Blackjack." (Chapter 4, p. 16). Through this quote you can see that the book follows directly what happened on the day of and before the massacre. The book gives you a step to step guide to everything that happened leading up to, during and after the shooting. You are given the chance to be in the shoes of someone living through this and are given a sense of what it felt like to experience such a tragedy and because of all the detail you are made to feel as if you were apart of it. Through this the novel achieves its main goal of teaching the audience about what really happen that day. Whereas the documentary is very focused on gun control problems and violence in America. “If more guns make people safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world. It isn't. It's the opposite” says a Canadian in the documentary Bowling for Columbine. The documentary is very focused on gun control and in it they are constantly going around interviewing people on different aspects of gun control. The documentary although inspired by Columbine and named after it, only briefly talks about what