Bowling for Columbine (2002)

The United States of America is notorious for its astronomical number of people killed by firearms for a developed nation without a civil war. With his signature sense of angry humor, activist filmmaker Michael Moore sets out to explore the roots of this bloodshed. In doing so, he learns that the conventional answers of easy availability of guns, violent national history, violent entertainment and even poverty are inadequate to explain this violence when other cultures share those same factors without the equivalent carnage.

The United States of America is notorious for its astronomical number of people killed by firearms for a developed nation without a civil war. With his signature sense of angry humor, activist filmmaker Michael Moore sets out to explore the roots of this bloodshed. In doing so, he learns that the conventional answers of easy availability of guns, violent national history, violent entertainment and even poverty are inadequate to explain this violence when other cultures share those same factors without the equivalent carnage. In order to arrive at a possible explanation, Michael Moore takes on a deeper examination of America's culture of fear, bigotry and violence in a nation with widespread gun ownership. Furthermore, he seeks to investigate and confront the powerful elite political and corporate interests fanning this culture for their own unscrupulous gain. Written by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com) Filmmaker Michael Moore sets out to explore the reason(s) behind the massacre of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. He documents how two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, easily acquired four pieces of firearms, despite of having a history of arrests, juvenile detention, counseling sessions, and drug dependencies. He documents how the U.S. has ended up as a country with the highest number of gun-related killings on Earth. With interviews with people like Charlton Heston, former President of the National Rifle Association, who lives in a fortified mansion, Moore shows how easy it is to acquire guns and munitions - with examples of a bank giving a free gun just for opening a bank account, and of one particular municipality that makes gun-ownership mandatory. Moore then links the involvement of the U.S. with tyrants and terrorists such as Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden for its' own narrow gains - resulting in deaths of millions of civilians from 1953 through to 2001 - and its' refusal to review and change it's now notorious 'Foreign Policy'.