Bowling for Columbine is Michael Moore’s documentary/expose/meditation on the culture of the gun in America, before and after the Columbine shootings. He’s the very picture of a midwest redneck, a big, shambling, check-shirted, baseball capped guy who was born more or less with a gun in his hands in a town and a nation that loves guns, and with a camera at his shoulder and a soft-voiced tenacity he challenges the ordinary, the powerful and the dangerous to explain their beliefs and actions to him, and juxtaposes their responses with the hilarious and the horrific: A South-Park style history of America and the gun. A black-and-white litany of the assassinations and invasions, the dictators supported and elected governments toppled, by US intervention. Grainy closed circuit TV footage of a room (cafeteria?) in Columbine school, with audio of a phone call made by a woman trapped in that room, as people curled under tables, broke, ran, and the white-haloed killers floated into view. What is the difference, he asks, between America and all the other countries whose gun-death rates are a fraction of America’s, even Canada, with 10 million households, 7 million guns. Racism? Economic depression … In his own home town, a 6 year old boy shot to death a 6 year old girl with a gun brought from his uncle’s house, where he was staying while his mother commuted 80 miles to work 2 jobs on a “work for welfare” program … The military-industrial axis … Was it a coincidence, he asked, that the day of the Columbine killings was also the single heaviest US assault on Kosovo … and the culture of fear … Fear of the burglar, the rapist, the black man … fed on and by a media to whom a story with a gun in it is news. Should a people who are that afraid, he asks, have that many loaded guns?

I could not help thinking, though, of a recent BMJ article on the subject of suicide in the media; accounts in the media often offer one-dimensional explanations and ignore the main risk factor for suicide: mental illness. Now, it may be a case of the carpenter thinking everything looks like a nail – the documentary filmmaker looks at cultural causes, and the bioscientist at biological/medical. But the Columbine shootings were the actions of two people either out of touch with reality, or out of touch with humanity. Not mentally healthy people driven to “snap” by a sick society.

Another interesting was how a basic child-safety issue was set aside for the narrative of poverty, welfare laws, and maternal absence. Acknowledged, he was developing themes, making creative decisions, and the decisions he made made it his own. But let me say it here: regardless of your politics, having loaded guns where small children can get them is bloody stupid. Moderating my language, it is what James Reason calls a latent unsafe condition, a failure in the system, and no amount of gun safety education in first and second grade will cancel out a latent unsafe condition. Someone is going to fall in the hole.

Never mind what the film did not say, it covered an amazing amount of ground, in a strong piece of ideological filmmaking. Leaving me with the thought that (a) America has set aside the cross for the gun (b) having some of these folk next door is scary (c) having some of these folk on the same planet is scary. I suspect that some of the attention the film has gathered is because it addresses the deep unease that non-Americans feel about America’s reactions to the rest of the world. Should a people that are that afraid have so many missiles? Which feeds into the right wing American belief that if they don’t defend themselves against a threatening world, no one else will.