Columbine Shootings

The documentary “Bowling for Columbine” is an award-winning documentary directed by well-known filmmaker Michael Moore. The film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, as well as an Independent Spirit Award, a Cesar Award and many others. This bold movie criticizes America’s large number of gun related deaths annually compared to other countries around the world. He discusses why America seems to have such a problem with violence and how it has led to tragedy’s involving firearms like the imfamous shooting at Columbine high school in Columbine, Colorado. Since the Columbine shooting in 1999 there have been other school shootings that seem to closely resemble it, such as the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting and the recent 2012 Sandy Hook
They investigate how the two boys from Columbine, despite their history of arrests, counseling, and drugs, were able to acquire the four guns used to take the lives of their fellow students and eventually their own. The film doesn’t only criticize the soft gun control laws in our country but also the government’s history of extreme ferocity and lack of regard for the human life, especially of individuals that aren’t Americans. They give examples of how the U.S. is bombing hundreds of innocent Afghans and Iraqis everyday yet somehow that example of violence has no influence on American’s tendency towards aggressive behavior. The video also links some of the U.S.’s choices through history to what led to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, saying that arming and training the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were key factors in the
More importantly than that we have been trying to figure out how to stop these events from happening in the future. Is the violence that America demonstrates in these instances a product of our media or is it due to our violent history? Or maybe the constant examples of aggression shown on our news stations every night instill not only fear in our society but also a belief that this behavior is somehow now the norm. Our society has become numb to the chaos and violence, making us an angrier people in general. Made very clear in the documentary, gun control is a serious issue in our country and changes need to be made so that it is not possible for two teenagers to get their hands on so many firearms and so much ammunition, walk into a high school and fire them at innocent students. Whether that means creating stricter laws or just making sure that the ones already in place are more strictly enforced, the issue of gun control needs to be worked on and resolved so that “Columbines” do not keep occurring in our