OK. Bowling for Columbine, My reaction.


Anyway, apparently trashing the media which could very well be a factor in the 'FUD' campaign of violence & reasons to be afraid, he continues on his tirade against firearms which is easier to make people hate I believe.

OK so I just spent (or maybe wasted) two hours watching Bowling for Columbine by the autistic child.

Now, I need to preface this little mini-review of mine with that I'm not a big fan of guns. I don't think they should be outlawed or anything extreme like that. I do think that maybe some of the existing laws should be enforced - strongly - and things could be better there. I personally have no desire to own a weapon, and I've only fired a .22 caliber rifle about 20 times one day when I shot up a TV outside my Dad's barn while they were out of town at the age of 16 - 18 I think. Not sure exactly what year but I had a TV in the trunk of the car that belonged to a friend of mine, and he slept with a girl I was dating so I blew away the TV. I may have been emulating the video my friends did that I mentioned in a previous blog where they blew away a TV. It seemed rather entertaining and I thought I'd try it.

I'd also like to mention that most video games with a light gun highly appeal to me, I enjoy it and usually get pretty far in the game. I've often thought about buying a gun but Angi has stopped me numerous times because she is very against having a firearm of any kind. So we never got one.

Anyway, back to my thoughts on the autistic child and his Bowling for Columbine movie. What drove me nuts about it was just as I was starting to get interested in what he'd have to say he'd do some type of tangent rant that would ruin what he'd just done.

I mean one part I liked his how he went to Canada and interviewed people about their attitudes on guns. He showed how homes were unlocked (which was rather funny, he'd just walk to the house and opened a door to see if they were unlocked). Anyway I digress. He talked with people, most of them had guns. Some even (gasp) had 6 - 12 each. What he started to draw as a parallel was that the news media in Canada doesn't have one of my most hated things about the US Media. US media spends every episode 'scaring' you about something. While the Canadian media (what he showed) was less on 'flash' and more on substance.

What was also interesting to me was the parallel he drew on how wells spoken the politicians were compared to some of ours. That was rather amusing but easily forged because you could always find a well spoken guy and a blithering idiot.

Anyway, apparently trashing the media which could very well be a factor in the 'FUD' campaign of violence & reasons to be afraid, he continues on his tirade against firearms which is easier to make people hate I believe.

One of the more interesting things was that he took two of the kids shot up at Columbine to K-Mart headquarters. Apparently K-Mart sold the bullets. However K-Mart doesn't sell handguns so the sold the bullets instead. They went to ask K-Mart to stop selling handgun bullets. Faced with an army of cameras the second day (from media hounds) they said they were going to remove all handgun bullets within 90 days. Coincidence? Who knows. It'd been nice if they followed up in a few months later and seen if they were actually gone, but they didn't.

Also the highlight of the show was to show up at Charlton Heston's home and interview him a bit. Apparently after a few high profile showings the NRA showed up within a week to declare that hand guns are wonderful and all. Entirely in bad taste in my opinion. One of them had a six year old shoot a six year old type of thing, and they were there in 48 hours. Heston claimed he didn't know about that one, and walked off when he was asked then why show up at the worst school massacre with Columbine. The autistic child had some good points and Heston had no good answers. I've not been a fan of the NRA and some of the things they were done but would have thought their 'president' could have come up with some answers to his questions.

Overall I'm not sure what I think. This leaned to some of my liberal sides, but also really irritated my centrist nature. He pushed a lot of buttons with agendas but also managed to sneak in a good idea here or there. I'm tempted to check out F911 as I've been from the start, but I think I'll wait for it to show up on Showtime or whatever it comes too. It's not like it'll change my opinion about our current appointed (er, sorry, ELECTED) leaders.

Posted: Fri - July 9, 2004 at 11:57 PM           |

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