While I try my best to avoid the tv show The View, but the show this
afternoon (actually listed as tuesday, october 8th)
was almost interesting, and definately thought provoking. The
first guest was Michael Moore, a
filmmaker and write who has the book “Stupid White Men” (read an excerpt chapter
here,
it’s a great read) and a movie coming out
called Bowling for Columbine.
He expressed something I mentioned to Firefly a couple of days ago. While
Americans will say that they have to own guns to protect themselves, and their
families, etc etc, the number of gun related deathes is still something like
6,000 a year, while Canada’s is something like 124. He quoted figures of 7
million out of 10 million homes in Canada having guns, but I don’t believe that,
as I have only known two, maybe three people in my life who
have owned a gun or guns. Anyway, he had an excellent point that the media
feeds american public with the tale of a rapist behind every bush, or any
number of horrible fates just waiting to destroy you and your family, if you
don’t have a way to defend yourself. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, as
Canada watches (based on my experience) most of the same television as the US.
I however, don’t feel like I need to own a fully-automatic machine gun with
armour-piercing rounds to feel safe.
They then got into a conversation about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction,
Iraq’s ability to deliver them or not, and it ended up sounding like media
fear-mongering. Mr. Moore however, has my respect as someone who has similar
views as my own about guns and violence, and appears to be mostly sane. He was
also responsible apparently for changing K-Mart’s policies and got them to stop
selling ammunition. He took a couple of survivors from the Columbine massacre
to K-Mart head office to return their merchandise (that being a $0.17 round
embedded in one kids spine). Good on you Micheal.