Document History
3/5/2003 - The article that never dies:
- 14% of Canada's population is non-white minority, not 11%. Thanks to Eric Tam for bringing to my attention the fact that Canada does not count the indigenous Canadians as a minority.
- Slate's David Edelstein added his voice to the growing number of liberals who recognize that Michael Moore is bad for liberals: "[T]he greatest danger to liberalism isn't the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Andrew Sullivan, but blowhards like Alan Parker and Michael Moore—the thugs of humanism. Given the way in which it's administered, I don't support the death penalty for people. But I emphatically support it for certain careers." Too bad Edelstein went so easy on Bowling for Columbine when it was released.
1/6/2003 - I have made a correction to my statistics about America and Canada's murder rates:
- Thanks to a forum thread on Michael Moore's web site, I have finally discovered where Moore got his statistic than America had 11,127 gun murders in 1999. Turns out that while the US Bureau of Justice Statistics reports 10,117 gun murders in 1999, the Center for Disease Control reported 11,127. So I unfairly attacked Moore for using an incorrect statistic.
- However, now that I have access to the CDC statistics, I have found a different distortion in Moore's reporting - he included deaths caused by legal intervention in the American statistics, but did not include them in the Canadian statistics.
- The funny thing is, the poster on the Michael Moore bulletin board who directed me to these statistics thinks that I am an conservative who is opposed to gun control, who is simply supporting gun control in this article for the sake of attacking Moore. Had he read the article a bit more closely - and avoided knee-jerk reactions - he would recognize that in fact I am a pro-gun control liberal who believes that Moore should be held to a basic standard of accuracy, regardless of his ideology.
12/18/2002 - I have made a number of corrections/additions to the statistics about murder rates:
- Moore claimed that there were 11,127 gun murders in the US, not 11,167.
- America had 6.5 times as many gun murders as Canada, not 14.5 times as many. I read from the wrong line in a chart. Plus I am now using the 1999 figures, which is what Moore is going from as well, rather than the 1998 figures. Therefore, America has 3.23 times as many murders as Canada, not 3.6 times as many.
- The number of gun murders in the US in 1999 was 10,117, not 11,127 as Moore claims.
- I note that America's murder rate in 2000 was 3.1 times as high as Canada's.
- Thanks very much to Thomas Flaschen for pointing out these statistics to me.