The goal of Michael Moore’s documentary film, Bowling for Columbine, is to persuade his white, liberal, affluent audience to believe his theory that Americans (especially Americans living in the middle of the country) are trigger-happy, fearful people who rely on violence to solve problems. Moore attempts to establish the ethos of an “average gun-owning American” by describing how much he loved guns as a little boy and that he is a lifetime member of the NRA, but he undercuts his credibility by choosing to interview members of the Michigan militia, an extremist fringe group, rather than other “average” gun-owning Americans. He crassly appeals to the audience’s sense of “white guilt” through his use of the cartoon, “A Brief History of the United
