... a note
from Michael Moore I did not want you to miss
Tuesday, July 24th, 2012
Friends,
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
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
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