Kopel On Mikey
Dave Kopel over at NRO has a world class fisking of Michael Moore and Bowling for Columbine. Most of the info in the article has been posted numerous times in the past, including both this blog and at Right-Thinking, as well as David Hardy’s site, but it does contain a few new, surprising revelations.
- On hunters: In 2000 . . . there were 91 fatal hunting accidents in all of North America, within a population of over 16 million hunters.
- On the Columbine killers: While one killer’s father once served in the Air Force, neither family worked in the defense industry. The other killer’s parents were gun-control advocates—so much so that they forbade him to play with toy guns—unlike the many children who are shown with toy guns elsewhere in the film. One of the killers’ gun suppliers was the son of a Colorado anti-gun activist.
- On racist gun owners: The Second Amendment is said to have been written “so every white man could keep his gun.” Actually, at the time of the Second Amendment, every state allowed free people of color to own guns. Moreover, anti-slavery activist Lysander Spooner would later use the Second Amendment as part of his argument to show that slavery was unconstitutional. Gun prohibition, he argued, is a condition of slavery; the Second Amendment guarantees the right of all people to own guns; hence slavery, and its attendant gun prohibition, are unconstitutional.
- On Kayla Rowland: We return to Flint, Mich., for a long segment on Kayla Rowland, a six-year-old girl who was fatally shot in school by a male classmate the same age. Moore blames Michigan’s requirement that welfare recipients work at a job. Because the killer’s mother, Tamarla Owens, commuted to work in a shopping mall 70 hours a week, and because she still could not pay her rent, she was about to be evicted. She thus moved in with her brother, and then her unsupervised son found a handgun, brought it to school, and killed Kayla Rowland.
Actually, Owens earned $7.85 an hour from one job ($1,250 a month, almost entirely tax-free), plus at least the minimum wage from her second job, and received food stamps and medical care. Her rent was $300 a month. Michigan had rent-subsidy and child-care programs too, but Owens apparently did not know about them. So, contrary to the impression created by Moore, Michigan’s welfare-to-work program is generous: Even without the rent subsidy, Owens earned more than enough to pay the rent.
Trust me, go and read the whole thing. It’s brilliant.
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