Remembering Columbine

Week of April 28, 2003

Last week marked the four year anniversary of the tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, students at Columbine, strode into the school with automatic weapons and bombs, emptying over 900 rounds of ammunition. They killed twelve students and a teacher, injured many more, and then took their own lives. It was the worst school shooting in the history of our country. Right now plans are underway for a $3 million memorial structure to be built by this time next year. In Clement Park next to the school, people have already left over a million mementos---cards, flowers, prayers, stuffed toys, and so on.

As I prepared to write this essay, a student brought a BB gun to my son’s high school campus, gave the gun to a girl, who in turn shot a fellow student. The school went into a lockdown for close to an hour and now the girl who did the shooting is in juvenile detention. Just three days later a gunman with an AK-47 automatic rifle shot and killed a student and injured three others at John McDonogh High School in New Orleans.

Recently I went to see the film Bowling for Columbine (2002) which was written and directed by the controversial film maker Michael Moore.¹ The movie won an Oscar for Best Documentary at the 2003 Academy Awards, and justly so. I didn’t think the film was great, but it was good enough and deeply disturbing in its exploration of America’s culture of gun violence.

The statistics for gun violence in our country are revolting. In 2000 there were 28,663 gun deaths in America, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Overall there were about 10.4 gun deaths per 100,000 people in our country (for black males ages 15-19 that rate skyrockets to 62.2 per 100,000). For gun suicides the rate is about 6.0 per 100,000 people, and for gun homicides about 3.9 per 100,000 people. According to Moore, Canada has about 7 million guns in 10 million households, but gun violence is far less of a problem. Their overall death rate by guns stands at about 4.0 per 100,000 people. They have about 2.8 gun suicides per 100,000, and 0.6 gun homicides per 100,000. If my math is correct, we have 6-7 times the number of gun homicides in America as in Canada on a per capita basis.²

Why does our country have an epidemic of gun violence? Four typical answers are that our country has a history of violence, that firearms are far too easy to obtain, that poverty breeds gun violence, or that much of our popular culture feeds this frenzy (violence in movies, music, video games, etc.). But as Moore points out, other advanced countries like Canada, Japan or Britain have similar profiles but far less gun violence. So he rejects these as satisfactory explanations.

Although Bowling For Columbine is ostensibly about gun violence, Moore turns his attention to broader themes to explore his topic. The problem is not necessarily poverty, easy availability or violent video games. Rather, we live in a culture of fear, paranoia, violence and bigotry. Watch the evening news for a few nights in a row and you will get his point. Most news that we absorb is, well, fearful. War, catastrophic weather, budget deficits, health epidemics, road rage, terrorism, airline safety and similar stories seem almost intended to instill fear. In one of the film’s funnier scenes, Moore harks back to the dire warnings we all received about killer bees that were supposed to invade our country from Central America, or the apocalyptic fears that were fed by Y2K warnings. Moore also interviews the sociologist Barry Glassner of USC whose book The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Fear The Wrong Things (2000) explores this larger cultural phenomenon. Why is it, for example, that so much of our media demonize black males (recall the famous Willy Horton incident)?

Another strength of Moore’s film is that he connects gun violence to other sorts of violence that, somehow, we don’t normally associate with violence. Close to Columbine High School is a Lockheed Martin facility---the largest facility in the world for producing weapons of mass destruction. As he interviews a Lockheed engineer, he asks the man if he sees any connection between the Columbine tragedy down the street and his very own employer; the man is dumbfounded to imagine any such connection. But I think an Iraqi might think otherwise; our country just dropped 20,000 bombs on them, according to a Newsweek statistic. We might have been looking for weapons of mass destruction, and using so-called smart bombs to do that, but 20,000 bombs is mass violence by any definition. In the three weeks of the war that works out to 1,000 bombs a day on a country the size of Texas.

Lockheed profited from that violence. K Mart also profits from gun violence. In a poignant section of the film, Moore interviews two students who were badly injured at Columbine, one of whom is bound to a wheelchair for life. The bullets that Klebold and Harris used were purchased at a local K-Mart. So Moore takes these two students to the corporate headquarters of K-Mart to ask why they make gun ammunition so easy to purchase, all for the sake of profit. To their credit, and to Moore’s shock, the scene ends when K-Mart discontinues the sale of ammo. But Moore’s point about the connection between corporate profits and a larger culture of fear and violence is well taken.³

Moore grew up a Flint, Michigan, a city whose economy has been devastated by the automotive industry. He fancies himself the champion of the common person who has no voice. He everso nonchalantly walks around in his trademark baggy jeans, sneakers, cap and scraggy beard. He is grossly overweight. His ambush journalism tactics can make for hilarious footage when his subjects squirm. He interviews Charlton Heston, for example, who shamelessly championed gun rights for the NRA in Denver right after the Columbine tragedy. After a few questions Heston storms away. These are cheap shots, but a signature of sorts of Moore’s films.

The film can romanticize and generalize. I doubt most sensitive Canadians think they have no problems with gun violence. Is the shock rocker Marilyn Manson, one of Moore’s subjects, the innocent cultural force that Moore insinuates? Other parts of the film used to espouse Moore’s socioeconomic views relate tenuously at best to gun violence, as when he blames a welfare to work program for the tragedy when a six year old boy used his uncle’s handgun to shoot a classmate at Buell Elementary School in Flint. And to be sure, at times Moore oversimplifies complex matters.

You don’t have to read far at all in the Bible before Cain murders his brother Abel (Genesis 4:8). For whatever many reasons, and perhaps moreso in our own country than elsewhere, violence is a human epidemic. Christians living on this side of Easter, however, pray and work for that day when “no longer will violence be heard in your land” (Isaiah 60:18).⁴

¹ The film will be available on VHS in December 2003.
² On these statistics see www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/firearms.htm; and www.guncontrol.ca.
³ Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger and Me, which exposed General Motors’s CEO Roger Smith for the catastrophic economic impact that GM’s downsizing had on Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, remains the highest-grossing documentary film of all time.
⁴ See Jacques Ellul, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective (NY: Seabury, 1969).