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

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

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