Two Scenes In The Documentary Bowling For Columbine By Michael Moore

In the documentary “Bowling for Columbine” by Michael Moore, there were two scenes that stood out to me about the comparison between America and Canada. These scenes are the brief history of America and Michael Moore visiting Windsor, Canada. These scenes show the contrast between the two countries.

In the scene Brief history of America, it uses cartoon to portray the silly nature of how America’s guns laws have come to be. They start off by showing how Americans were scared of everyone so they went to the new world, there they started to kill all the natives, killed English men for Independence, then gun laws came in, they brought slaves over to do all their work, A Civil War broke out and the North won, KKK and NRA were formed, African

This was so he could show the viewer how Americans saying that they were brought up to be gun owners is just childish excuses that they say to blame on why America has so many gun related deaths compared to the rest of the world. But is America really safe? With all these relaxed gun laws and Americas history, is it safe or is it as dangerous as the statistics tell us? Moore used very patriotic music to symbolise Americas very selfabsest history of them having the viewpoint that they are the most safest independent country out there. Moore shows the irony of what Americans think of their country to what their history really was. The use of title of “Or did they” on a black screen, this changed the tone of the documentary from a ironic comedy carton into a more serious rhetorical question asking is America as safe as they think they are. In 2011 The United States of America had a total of 8,583 firearm murders, this had come down by 3% from 2010. Firearm murders were 68% of all murder in the United States in 2011 (http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jan/10/gun-crime-us-state). California had the most firearm murders of 2011 with

The scene starts of with Moore going to Windsor Canada, he interviews local Canadians, he interviews Americans on why Canada has fewer firearm related deaths, he goes and interviews a Canadian gun store owner, he then brought amo to show how easy acces anyone has to it and then goes and opens doors to see if the houses in Windsor really were left unlocked. Moore used the effect of interview in this scene to show how Canadians were comfortable in how safe they feel even though robberies could happen they had no fear about being murdered. Moore wanted to show the audience what real people thought about safety in Canada, he used the technique Vox Pop to show this by asking members of the public to say do they think Canada is safe and asked if they would leave their doors unlocked. Moore backed this up by going into peoples houses to see if they really do leave their doors unlocked. Canada isn 't afraid of firearms but they do have less firearm related murders than America. Moore also uses the technique of Music by playing jazz music, this is to set a happy mood and by making it happy it gives off the feel of safty. In a study from 2012 (http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list) they list the number of homicides by firearm by country. America had a total of 9,146 in