From: owner-can-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca (Cdn-Firearms Digest) To: cdn-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Subject: Cdn-Firearms Digest V5 #772 Reply-To: cdn-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Sender: owner-can-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Errors-To: owner-can-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Precedence: normal Cdn-Firearms Digest Friday, February 14 2003 Volume 05 : Number 772 In this issue: Viewer beware Re: Ring Re: VALENTINE'S DAY One Moore stupid white man Liberal MP doesn't even know that the Senate sent Bill C-10A back WITHOUT AMENDMENTS Re: VALENTINE'S DAY Re: Thanks for the help... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 13:17:06 -0600 (CST) From: Bruce Mills Subject: Viewer beware http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20021119.html Viewer beware In "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore once again puts distortions and contradictions before the truth By Ben Fritz (ben@spinsanity.org) November 19, 2002 Michael Moore insists he wants to be taken seriously. The author and filmmaker, an unabashed champion for liberal causes, is challenging America's gun culture with his latest endeavor, the documentary "Bowling for Columbine." Like his first film, "Roger and Me," it consists of a mix of satirical interviews with average people, confrontational interviews with celebrities and Moore's thoughts on what is going wrong with America. The argument often takes a back seat to the humor, but that's just Moore's style, as he explained to the Contra Costa Times in March: "I always assume that only 10 to 20 percent of people who read my books or see my films will take the facts and hard-core analysis and do something with it. If I can bring the other 80 percent to it through entertainment and comedy, then some of it will trickle through." The problem is, once you delve beneath the humor, it turns out his "facts and hard-core analysis" are frequently inaccurate, contradictory and confused. At one point in the film, Moore apparently even alters a Bush-Quayle campaign ad, changing history to make a point. Like many of the political celebrities increasingly filling our TV screens and bookstores, he is entertaining, explicitly partisan, and all too willing to twist facts to promote himself and his vision of the truth. Moore's problems with veracity date back to "Roger and Me," in which he famously shifted the actual timeline of events for dramatic effect. While garnering some criticism, most notably from the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, the distortions didn't get too many people riled up; indeed, the movie made him a celebrity. This year, with the double-whammy of his best-selling book Stupid White Men and the box office success of "Bowling for Columbine," one of the most financially successful documentaries ever, Moore has become the American left's most prominent media figure. They could use a better spokesman. As I showed in April, Stupid White Men is riddled with inaccuracies and ad hominem attacks. In it, Moore claims that five-sixths of the 2001 defense budget went towards a single plane and that two-thirds of President Bush's campaign funds came from just over seven hundred people. Both facts are obviously untrue to anyone remotely familiar with the defense budget or campaign finance law and are disproved by the very sources Moore cites. He accuses former President Clinton of having "kick[ed] ten million people off of welfare," assuming that every person who left the rolls during the '90s boom was brutally left to fend for herself, rather than leaving for a job. The book is riddled with similarly absurd arguments, most notably that the recession is a creation of the wealthy who "are wallowing in the loot they've accumulated in the past two decades, and now they want to make sure you don't come a-lookin' for your piece of the pie." "Bowling for Columbine" is more of the same. Although, like Stupid White Men, it's full of hilarious moments, Moore can't seem to keep his facts or his arguments straight. Counterintuitively for a liberal, he wants to argue that gun control is not a significant factor in America's high rate of gun deaths compared to other countries, and to do so, he travels to Canada, which he claims is similar to the U.S. in every way except its attitude towards self-reliance. He dismisses typical liberal concerns about poverty creating crime, noting that, "Liberals contend [gun violence is a result of] all the poverty we have here. But the unemployment rate in Canada is twice what we have here." By every measure of international comparison, though, Canada's poverty rate is significantly lower than that of the U.S., thanks to the generous social insurance programs that he repeatedly praises in the film. Much more mendaciously, Moore has apparently altered footage of an ad run by the Bush/Quayle campaign in 1988 to implicate Bush in the Willie Horton scandal. Making a point about the use of racial symbols to scare the American public, he shows the Bush/Quayle ad called "Revolving Doors," which attacked Michael Dukakis for a Massachusetts prison furlough program by showing prisoners entering and exiting a prison (the original ad can be seen here [Real Player video]). Superimposed over the footage of the prisoners is the text "Willie Horton released. Then kills again." This caption is displayed as if it is part of the original ad. However, existing footage, media reports and the recollections of several high-level people involved in the campaign indicate that the "Revolving Doors" ad did not explicitly mention Horton, unlike the notorious ad run by the National Security Political Action Committee (which had close ties to Bush media advisor Roger Ailes). In addition, the caption is incorrect -- Horton did not kill anyone while on prison furlough (he raped a woman). Although he uses statistics much less frequently in "Bowling for Columbine" than in Stupid White Men, Moore still manages to present at least one figure inaccurately. During a stylized overview of US foreign policy, he claims that the U.S. gave $245 million in aid to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001. The Taliban aid tale is a favorite of Moore's that he has repeated in numerous media appearances over the past year. Contrary to his claim, the aid did not go to the Taliban -- it actually consisted of food and food security programs administered by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations to relieve an impending famine. Beyond the satire and the fabrications, just what is Moore's argument? It's often hard to tell. At times, while dismissing the influence of pop culture, he blames the government's militarism, suggesting that it's somehow relevant that the day of the Columbine High School shootings was also the day of one of the heaviest U.S.-led NATO bombings in Yugoslavia. (Moore is an ardent opponent of U.S. military intervention - soon after the war on terrorism began, he called the President and Vice President "Bin Bush" and "Bin Cheney" and said on the radio program "Democracy Now" [Real Player audio], "We're the national sniper when it comes to going after countries like Iraq.") Even setting aside this questionable chain of causality, Moore contradicts his own thesis that foreign bombing leads to domestic gun violence when he approvingly notes that the United Kingdom, which played a leading role in bombing Yugoslavia with the U.S., had only 68 gun homicides the same year America had 11,127. Contradicting himself doesn't seem to be a problem for Moore, though. In the movie and subsequent media appearances, he has derided America's lack of a social safety net, comparing us unfavorably to Canada, even though he states explicitly in the film that the two countries don't differ significantly in terms of poverty. Moore also claims several times that our higher gun homicide rate must be the result of American culture rather than the greater number of guns in our country, citing the fact that Canada has a much lower gun homicide rate despite having seven million guns in its ten million homes (Moore ignores the fact that Canada has significantly fewer handguns and a much stricter gun licensing system). Yet that doesn't stop him from repeatedly bashing the anti-gun control NRA and even making a visit to the home of its president, Charlton Heston, the climax of the movie. In an e-mail to supporters , Moore even referred to Heston as a "gun supremacist." And in an interview on Phil Donahue's MSNBC show recently, Moore said he supports banning all handguns just minutes before stating, "I don't think, ultimately, getting rid of the guns will be the answer." Repeatedly, though, he returns to the issue of fear in the movie, claiming that excessive coverage of gun violence by the media makes Americans scared of each other and therefore more violent. This circular argument doesn't make any sense either. On the one hand, Moore has made an entire film purporting to investigate why the U.S. has the highest rate of gun violence in the developed world. He then attempts to answer the question by theorizing that the media provides too much coverage of gun violence, causing citizens to fear each other. If gun violence is really so bad, though, shouldn't the media be covering it and don't citizens have something to be afraid of? And if the media is indeed over-covering the issue and America is safer than we think, why did Moore make this film? Ironically, Moore interviews and cites the work of USC Professor Barry Glassner, whose book The Culture of Fear attacks the media for sensationalizing incidents of bad news while ignoring the bigger picture. One of the book's primary examples is extensive media coverage of school shootings that ignores the overall downward trend in youth violence in recent years. Indeed, Glassner points out that people are three times more likely to be struck dead by lightning than die in a school shooting. Moore, however, focuses extensively in the film on the Columbine massacre and a school shooting in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and doesn't seem all that concerned with the country's epidemic of lightning strikes. Here, as ever, Michael Moore just doesn't seem to know what he thinks. When pressed, in fact, he isn't even sure he actually has a point. Appearing on CNN's Moneyline last spring, host Lou Dobbs asked him about the inaccuracies in Stupid White Men. "How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?" Moore responded. Satire is not an excuse for dissembling. Great satirists like Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain used hyperbole as a form of social criticism. Michael Moore, however, uses lies, distortions, and nonsensical arguments to mask cheap attacks and promote his own political agenda. Take him seriously at your own risk. Clarification - 11/20 9:34 AM EST: The figure on homicides in the United Kingdom should have read that that country had 68 gun homicides the same year the U.S. had 11,127, not total homicides. This website is copyright (c) 2001-2002 by Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan. Please send letters to the editor for publication to letters@spinsanity.org and private questions or comments to feedback@spinsanity.org. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 13:17:31 -0600 (CST) From: "John E. Stevens" Subject: Re: Ring At 12:10 PM 2/14/2003 -0600, you wrote: >Hello 911, this is Chloe Sousa. Send appropriate help I hear fire. I'm sorry ma'am. In this township, you have to call the fire dept. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 13:17:59 -0600 (CST) From: "John E. Stevens" Subject: Re: VALENTINE'S DAY At 12:11 PM 2/14/2003 -0600, you wrote: >I wish everyone a happy Valentine's day. Being a romantic, I bought my >wife a case of shells for that 12 gauge the CFC doesn't know she owns. you spendthrift........:) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 13:18:31 -0600 (CST) From: Bruce Mills Subject: One Moore stupid white man http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20020403.html One Moore stupid white man With his factually challenged bestseller, Michael Moore becomes an unfortunate poster boy for dissent. By Ben Fritz (ben@spinsanity.org) April 3, 2002 [First published on Salon.com] Michael Moore's latest success might be his most remarkable. At a time when the public remains strongly supportive of the Bush administration - -- and few dissenting voices have risen above the din -- his book "Stupid White Men" stands atop the New York Times bestseller list for a third week running. And at a time when some Republican leaders are using Bush's popularity to equate any criticism of U.S. policy with treason, Moore's success should be a reason for any democracy-loving American to cheer. It should be, but it isn't. "Stupid White Men" is full of the biting satire Moore has honed on a large scale ever since the release of his 1989 documentary of General Motors' mistreatment of its workers in Flint, Mich., "Roger and Me," became a hit. He followed that up with a mid-'90s TV series, "TV Nation," the bestselling book "Downsize This!" and the 1998 documentary "The Big One," all of which employ his trademark defense of the little guy against the unchecked callousness of corporate America. [Disclosure: My co-editor Brendan Nyhan and I helped bring Moore to speak at Swarthmore College while we were students there. Moore was paid an honorarium by the college for his speech.] With the success of "Roger and Me" also came a critical rap: That he took liberties with the truth, fiddling with the chronology, for greater dramatic effect. But that criticism doesn't seem to have made an impression on Moore, and that's nowhere more apparent than in "Stupid White Men." In it, readers are told that 10 million people left the welfare rolls during the '90s, brutally kicked off by Bill Clinton. He writes that five-sixths of the defense budget in 2001 went toward building a single type of plane and that the recent recession is nothing more than a fabrication by the wealthy to keep down the working classes. And readers who uncritically accept those "facts" -- along with a number of other egregious and sloppy distortions -- will be duped. Good satire also should be grounded in fact. Regrettably, Moore gets his facts wrong again and again and again, and a simple check of the sources he cites shows that lazy research is often to blame. Consider, for instance, his claim that "two-thirds of [the over $190 million President Bush raised during the presidential campaign] came from just over seven hundred individuals." Given the $2,000 federal limit on individual donations, this claim is obviously false. To back it up, he cites the Center for Responsive Politics Web site (opensecrets.org) and an August 2000 article from the New York Times. As opensecrets.org clearly indicates, however, only 52.6 percent of Bush's total $193 million in campaign funds came from individuals. The Times article Moore references actually states that 739 people gave two-thirds of the soft money raised by the Republican Party (which uses its money for "party-building" activities that support all GOP candidates, not just Bush) in the 2000 election cycle as of June of that year. Whether out of malice or laziness, Moore conflates the party's soft money with Bush's campaign funds. This pattern -- the very sources Moore cites proving him wrong -- continues throughout the book. In a discussion of Pentagon spending, he refers to the "$250 billion the Pentagon plans to spend in 2001 to build 2800 new Joint Strike Fighter planes" and states that "the proposed increase in monies for the Pentagon over the next four years is $1.6 trillion." To back this up, he refers to the Web site of the peace activist group Council for a Livable World. CLW's own analysis of the 2001 budget, however, shows that $250 billion is the total multiyear cost of the Joint Strike Fighter program, not the amount spent in one year. $1.6 trillion, meanwhile, was the total amount of money requested by the Pentagon at the time for 2001-2005. It covers five years, not four, and is a total budget request, not a "proposed increase" over previously requested budget levels. It shouldn't even take this much research, however, to determine that out of the total defense budget request of $305.4 billion in 2001, $250 billion was never intended to go toward one type of plane, nor that an increase of $400 billion per year in military spending was never proposed. Most baffling of Moore's misstatements may come in a listing of categories that the U.S. tops, such as per capita energy use and births to teenagers. In a blatant misrepresentation, he states: "We're number one in budget deficit (as a percentage of GDP)." When Moore wrote his book last year, the United States was running a budget surplus, as it had for the previous three years. Just how did Moore get so many of his facts wrong? Lazy cribbing from media outlets and the Internet seems the most likely culprit, as evidenced by a four-page list of allegedly dubious policy accomplishments by President Bush, including cutting funds from libraries and appointing former business executives to regulatory posts. All but one of the 48 accusations appear in the same order and with very similar phrasing to a list that has been printed this winter (but before Moore's book came out) on liberal Web sites and, according to Dr. David A. Sprintzen (often wrongly cited, though not by Moore, as its author), was circulating via e-mail last summer. Belying a lack of original research, Moore even apes many of the negative characterizations of individuals, calling judicial appointee Terrence Boyle a "civil rights opponent," for example (the list refers to him as a "foe of civil rights"), with absolutely no context for why exactly Boyle deserves that moniker (one certainly has to wonder whether Moore himself knows). Curiously, Moore cites no source for this list. He only notes that readers "can keep track of what Bush did and does during his administration" by reading Molly Ivins' syndicated column and the Web sites smirkingchimp.com and bushwatch.com. The latter two did print the list, but not unti this winter, well after Moore wrote his book, though before it was published. Just as worrisome as Moore's frequent mistakes is the distorted manner in which he presents some of his claims that have a factual basis. Consider, for example, this critique of Bill Clinton. "[H]e has been able to kick ten million people off welfare," he writes in a list of attacks on the former president. While the welfare rolls did drop substantially while Clinton was in office (although the total number as of June 2000 was 8.3 million), many people left voluntarily to take jobs as the economy grew or for other reasons. Far fewer were booted from the rolls by the five-year limits Clinton signed into law in 1996 or by stricter state limits. Grossly misrepresenting the facts to make Bill Clinton look bad is a pattern in his chapter "Democrats, DOA." Moore also derides Clinton's record on feminism, stating "Clinton learned that by talking a good feminist line, he could arrange it so that not one feminist leader would decry the order he signed in 1999 to deny federal funds to any foreign group that discussed abortion during consultations." Moore is correct about the law here (although Gloria Feldt of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America did criticize the move). In framing Clinton as having a crafty antiabortion agenda, however, he blatantly ignores that Clinton eliminated the so-called "Mexico City Policy" banning U.S. funding of overseas clinics that perform or promote abortion in 1993 and only reluctantly signed it back into law in 1999 as part of a deal to pay nearly $1 billion in arrears to the United Nations. The funding was then restored in the next year's budget, albeit with concessions to delay its implementation, which Moore also fails to note. To truly understand how absurdly Moore twists the truth to advance his agenda, consider his description of the economic downturn. After accurately describing the hard times that have hit the country in the past year, he offers this analysis to his readers: "There is no recession, my friends. No downturn. No hard times. The rich are wallowing in the loot they've accumulated in the past two decades, and now they want to make sure you don't come a-lookin' for your piece of the pie." Forget about overinvestment during the tech boom, a sharp drop in business spending or even the simple facts of the business cycle. Michael Moore has the real answer: "[The rich have] decided to perform a preemptive strike in the hope that you'll never even think of eyeing their piles of cash." Not content to simply berate the wealthy for their disproportionate advances in income and wealth during the '90s boom, Moore takes his aggressive jargon to extremes by concocting a conspiracy in which the elite simply created a downturn that he claims doesn't really exist. This isn't satire, it's paranoid propaganda. For the bestselling nonfiction book in the country, "Stupid White Men" has received remarkably little scrutiny and few serious reviews. Moore is much beloved in Britain, and a review on a BBC show called his book "fantastic" with "loads of research." Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have read much of it -- though the thousands of people who have bought his book surely don't know that. This website is copyright(c) 2001-2002 by Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan. Please send letters to the editor for publication to letters@spinsanity.org and private questions or comments to feedback@spinsanity.org. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 13:23:18 -0600 (CST) From: "Breitkreuz, Garry - Assistant 1" Subject: Liberal MP doesn't even know that the Senate sent Bill C-10A back WITHOUT AMENDMENTS House of Commons Debates Friday, February 14, 2003 ORAL QUESTION PERIOD Unedited copy - not official until printed in Hansard * * * Mr. Julian Reed (Halton, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, my question if for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice. The House may be called upon to concur or reject Senate amendments to Bill C-10, the cruelty to animals and firearms bill. Could the parliamentary secretary please explain to this House what are the advantages to Canadians for accepting the Senate amendments to Bill C-10 rather than having them rejected? Mr. Paul Harold Macklin (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for the question. It is very important with respect to the process of gun control that we start to reduce the costs. Bill C-10A is an excellent way of starting that process. When dealing with Bill C-10A, it also deals with efficiencies and the efficiencies are simplifying the licensing process in terms of renewals, staggering renewals, more use of the Internet, establishing pre-clearance processes for those who want to come over to this country to use our outfitters and hunting establishments, streamlining transfers from one to another. It is an excellent-- ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 13:44:46 -0600 (CST) From: Michel Hebert Subject: Re: VALENTINE'S DAY Actually, it is amour. No harm done. LOL. Michel At 13:16 2/14/2003 -0600, you wrote: >Ammo - that French for love, isn't it? > >Or is it armour? > >Bob Lickacz >Criminal, LUFA Member ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 13:45:33 -0600 (CST) From: Bruce Mills Subject: Re: Thanks for the help... "E. John Wilson" wrote: > > I would like to thank those who replied to my query re: storage of gun > powder. > I now have another question; I'm in the process of building a > muzzleloading percussion rifle with interchangeable barrels, what I need > to know is at what point does my assemblage of bits and pieces require > lock up when I leave my work bench? For example, if I assembled all the > bits and pieces I'd have an unfinished shootable black powder firearm. > Just wondered if works in progress (over several months) were exempt > from the storage requirements until assembled... thanks John. This is a tricky question; a "firearm" is defined, in its most basic state, as being the "frame or receiver": "firearm" means a barrelled weapon from which any shot, bullet or other projectile can be discharged and that is capable of causing serious bodily injury or death to a person, and includes any frame or receiver of such a barrelled weapon and anything that can be adapted for use as a firearm; What is the "frame or receiver" for a muzzleloader? I would hazard a guess that it would be a piece of pipe with a plug on one end, and a touch hole drilled in the side; however, the frame or receiver of a modern firearm is not capable of discharging a bullet, so maybe it is only a piece of pipe with a plug in the end. It would seem that only a Judge in a court of law can make this determination - after you have been arrested and charged, of course. In any case, you had better put a serial number on your percussion cap gun, since once it *is* completed, it becomes a "firearm" and not a reproduction of an antique, and you will have to register it. Keep in mind that you may use letters and numbers in different combinations as a "serial number". May I recommened "C-68 SUCKS"? Yours in Liberty, Bruce Hamilton Ontario ------------------------------ End of Cdn-Firearms Digest V5 #772 ********************************** Submissions: mailto:cdn-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Mailing List Commands: mailto:majordomo@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Moderator's e-mail address: mailto:akimoya@sprint.ca List owner: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca FAQ list: http://www.magma.ca/~asd/cfd-faq1.html and http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Faq/cfd-faq1.html Web Site: http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/homepage.html FTP Site: ftp://teapot.usask.ca/pub/cdn-firearms/ CFDigest Archives: http://www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/~ab133/ or put the next command in an e-mail message and mailto:majordomo@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca get cdn-firearms-digest v04.n192 end (192 is the digest issue number and 04 is the volume) To unsubscribe from _all_ the lists, put the next five lines in a message and mailto:majordomo@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca unsubscribe cdn-firearms-digest unsubscribe cdn-firearms-alert unsubscribe cdn-firearms-chat unsubscribe cdn-firearms end (To subscribe, use "subscribe" instead of "unsubscribe".) If you find this service valuable, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the freenet we use: Saskatoon Free-Net Assoc., P.O. Box 1342, Saskatoon SK S7K 3N9 Phone: (306) 382-7070 Home page: http://www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/ These e-mail digests are free to everyone, and are made possible by the efforts of countless volunteers. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this digest as long as it not altered in any way.