FROM: E-MAIL SENT OUT BY MICHAEL MOORE REGARDING GUN CONTROL
Since Cain went nuts and whacked Abel, there have always been
those humans who, for one reason or another, go temporarily or permanently
insane and commit unspeakable acts of violence. There was the Roman Emperor
Tiberius, who during the first century A.D. enjoyed throwing victims off a cliff
on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Gilles de Rais, a French knight and ally
of Joan of Arc during the middle ages, went cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs one day and
ended up murdering hundreds of children. Just a few decades later Vlad the
Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, was killing people in Transylvania in
numberless horrifying ways.
In modern times, nearly every nation has had
a psychopath or two commit a mass murder, regardless of how strict their gun
laws are – the crazed white supremacist in Norway one year ago Sunday, the
schoolyard butcher in Dunblane, Scotland, the École Polytechnique killer in
Montreal, the mass murderer in Erfurt, Germany … the list seems endless.
And now the Aurora shooter last Friday. There have always been insane
people, and there always will be.
But here's the difference between the
rest of the world and us: We have TWO Auroras that take place every single
day of every single year! At least 24 Americans every day (8-9,000 a
year) are killed by people with guns – and that doesn't count the ones
accidentally killed by guns or who commit suicide with a gun. Count
them and you can triple that number to over 25,000.
That means the
United States is responsible for over 80% of all the gun deaths in the
23 richest countries combined. Considering that the people of
those countries, as human beings, are no better or worse than any of us, well,
then, why us?
Both conservatives and liberals in America operate with
firmly held beliefs as to "the why" of this problem. And the reason neither can
find their way out of the box toward a real solution is because, in fact,
they're both half right.
The right believes that the Founding Fathers,
through some sort of divine decree, have guaranteed them the absolute right to
own as many guns as they desire. And they will ceaselessly remind you that a gun
cannot fire itself – that "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."
Of course, they know they're being intellectually dishonest (if I can
use that word) when they say that about the Second Amendment because they know
the men who wrote the constitution just wanted to make sure a militia could be
quickly called up from amongst the farmers and merchants should the Brits decide
to return and wreak some havoc.
But they are half right when they say
"Guns don't kill people." I would just alter that slogan slightly to speak the
real truth: "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people."
Because
we're the only ones in the first world who do this en masse. And you'll hear all
stripes of Americans come up with a host of reasons so that they don't have to
deal with what's really behind all this murder and mayhem.
They'll say
it's the violent movies and video games that are responsible. Last time I
checked, the movies and video games in Japan are more violent than ours
– and yet usually fewer than 20 people a year are killed there with guns – and
in 2006 the number was two!
Others will say it's the number of broken
homes that lead to all this killing. I hate to break this to you, but there are
almost as many single-parent homes in the U.K. as there are here – and yet, in
Great Britain, there are usually fewer than 40 gun murders a year.
People like me will say this is all the result of the U.S. having a
history and a culture of men with guns, "cowboys and Indians," "shoot first and
ask questions later." And while it is true that the mass genocide of the Native
Americans set a pretty ugly model to found a country on, I think it's safe to
say we're not the only ones with a violent past or a penchant for genocide.
Hello, Germany! That's right I'm talking about you and your history, from the
Huns to the Nazis, just loving a good slaughter (as did the Japanese, and the
British who ruled the world for hundreds of years – and they didn't achieve that
through planting daisies). And yet in Germany, a nation of 80 million people,
there are only around 200 gun murders a year.
So those countries (and
many others) are just like us – except for the fact that more people here
believe in God and go to church than any other Western nation.
My
liberal compatriots will tell you if we just had less guns, there would be less
gun deaths. And, mathematically, that would be true. If you have less arsenic in
the water supply, it will kill less people. Less of anything bad – calories,
smoking, reality TV – will kill far fewer people. And if we had strong gun laws
that prohibited automatic and semi-automatic weapons and banned the sale of
large magazines that can hold a gazillion bullets, well, then shooters like the
man in Aurora would not be able to shoot so many people in just a few minutes.
But this, too, has a problem. There are plenty of guns in Canada (mostly
hunting rifles) – and yet the annual gun murder count in Canada is around 200
deaths. In fact, because of its proximity, Canada's culture is very similar to
ours – the kids play the same violent video games, watch the same movies and TV
shows, and yet they don't grow up wanting to kill each other. Switzerland has
the third-highest number of guns per capita on earth, but still a low murder
rate.
So – why us?
I posed this question a decade ago in my film 'Bowling
for Columbine,' and this week, I have had little to say because I feel I
said what I had to say ten years ago – and it doesn't seem to have done a whole
lot of good other than to now look like it was actually a crystal ball posing as
a movie.
This is what I said then, and it is what I will say again
today:
1. We Americans are incredibly good killers. We
believe in killing as a way of accomplishing our goals. Three-quarters of our
states execute criminals, even though the states with the lower murder rates are
generally the states with no death penalty.
Our killing is not just
historical (the slaughter of Indians and slaves and each other in a "civil"
war). It is our current way of resolving whatever it is we're afraid of. It's
invasion as foreign policy. Sure there's Iraq and Afghanistan – but we've been
invaders since we "conquered the wild west" and now we're hooked so bad we don't
even know where to invade (bin Laden wasn't hiding in Afghanistan, he was in
Pakistan) or what to invade for (Saddam had zero weapons of mass destruction and
nothing to do with 9/11). We send our lower classes off to do the killing, and
the rest of us who don't have a loved one over there don't spend a single minute
of any given day thinking about the carnage. And now we send in remote pilotless
planes to kill, planes that are being controlled by faceless men in a lush, air
conditioned studio in suburban Las Vegas. It is madness.
2. We are an
easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we
so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think
is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural
homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, #1
in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated,
frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take
better care of each other (here's a good example of what I mean).
Those are my
thoughts about Aurora and the violent country I am a citizen of. Like I said, I spelled it all
out here if you'd like to watch it or share it for free with others. All
we're lacking here, my friends, is the courage and the resolve. I'm in if you
are.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com
@MMFlint
MichaelMoore.com
