Michael Moore: ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, Americans Kill People’

Leftwing filmmaker and gun control proponent Michael Moore observed that the NRA is “partially right” when they say “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” He simply wants them to augment the latter portion of the phrase so that it reads: “Guns don’t kill people, Americans kills people.”

Moore claims the use of guns for deadly purposes is characteristically American, and he points to the behavior of people in other nations that have guns in an attempt to prove this.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Moore said, “It’s clear that the NRA is actually half-right in their slogan, ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ We just need to modify that to: ‘Guns don’t kill people — Americans kill people.'”

To bolster this claim, Moore pointed to Canadians, who have “an estimated five million hunting rifles and shotguns in their homes” yet “don’t go and shoot each other on a daily basis like we do.” And he said the explanation for the difference in Canadian behavior versus American behavior cannot be attributed to the violent movies Americans watch or the graphic video games Americans play because Canadians are watching the same movies and playing the same games.

He pointed to Japan and Australia as well, both of which have draconian gun controls in place, but hedged the comparison by admitting that America not only has guns but always will. And he said, “Unfortunately, even if we had stronger gun laws, we would still have a few thousand gun deaths in this country. That’s because we have a problem no law can solve.”

Ultimately, Moore says Americans kill each out of “fear.” Buying into the left’s tried and untrue argument that owning a gun puts your life at greater danger simply by the fact of having a gun, Moore suggests fear drives Americans to buy guns and then a greater number of Americans end up dying because they have guns. He elaborated by suggesting that owning guns makes it easier to commit suicide, makes it easier to kill people you know (“domestic situations”), and, of course, makes it easier for a shouting match in the parking lot or front yard to turn deadly.

Missing from all this theorizing are a few pertinent facts that actually contribute to the approximately 10,000 firearm-related homicides in the U.S. each year. One of those facts is gang and street violence–like the kind we see in heavily gun-controlled cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans, New York City, St. Louis, and others. On December 22 the Chicago Tribune reported there have been 2,887 shooting victims in Chicago year-to-date. That’s 2,887 shooting victims in a city where “assault weapons” are banned, where extra taxes are levied on gun and ammunition purchases, where gun stores exist only in suburbs, and where myriad other gun controls make it very difficult to acquire a gun legally–even out of “fear” of losing one’s life.

Yet far from decreasing crime, Chicago has become notorious for gun crime and firearm-related death and carnage.

Why didn’t Michael Moore mention this?

Instead he mentioned the October 1 shooting at Umpqua Community College (UCC), the November 27 Planned Parenthood shooting, and the December 2 San Bernardino attack, lumping them together as examples of “mass shootings” without taking the time to explain the details of each. Had he gotten into the details he would have explained that only one of three was a “mass shooting”–the UCC shooting. The Planned Parenthood incident was a triple murder and the San Bernardino incident was a terrorist attack.

Describing them all as “mass shootings” not only inflates the number of mass shootings that have occurred but also allows one to scrimp on explaining causality–which means you don’t have point to things like gun free zones (UCC) or Islam (San Bernadino), etc.

Ultimately Moore is partially right, “Guns don’t kill people.”

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.