However, this in-your-face and over-the-top director makes a convincing case that he was the exact right person to tell the story that is his new film, from his own distinctive point of view. For one thing, Moore's home state of Michigan is clearly a crossroads for the gun culture he's trying to understand here: home to the Michigan Militia, just ordinary folk who arm to the teeth and practice camo-clad weekend night patrols, home to Oklahoma bombing conspirator Terry Nichols' brother, James, who was arrested but released and happy to share his own paranoid vision here with Moore — even goof around for him with the handgun he keeps under his pillow: making Moore's point quite neatly: too many weirdos with weapons.

On the other hand, you can't get much more ordinary than Littleton, observes former resident and South Park co-creator Matt Stone. On April 20, 1999, two ordinary kids at local Columbine High School, after their morning bowling class, went to school killed twelve of their fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves. Like most of the rest of us, Moore wants to know how this could have happened, and he's especially keen to discover why such violence has become so ordinary in America as compared to the rest of the world.

All sorts of interesting clues are offered here, and they point beyond a pair of lone gunmen, implicating a deeply-ingrained American culture of violence. Moore investigates locally, touring the Lockheed missile factory which sends a nuke through Littleton once a month on its way to the silo. He notes that on the day of the Columbine massacre, the U. S. dropped more bombs on Kosovo than they had at any other time during that war. In one extended sequence, the castle-stormer takes his questions to the Michigan headquarters of K-Mart, which sold the high school killers their cheap ammo: to make his point, Moore brings along a couple Columbine survivors with K-Mart bullets in their bodies. The surprising result of this assault makes one wonder if the pen (that is, the camera) may turn out to be mightier than the sword (or guns) after all.

Meanwhile, Moore also rounds up usual suspects like Marilyn Manson, the shockrocker and popular parental scapegoat. In their interview, Moore nods grimly as Manson charges that ours is a culture that turns fear into consumption, without noting that's a pretty good description of Manson's own success. But if Manson gets off easy, NRA president Charleton Heston, the anti-gun movement's Manson, gets his in a final confrontation.

Of late President Heston has made news with his announcement that he, like his friend and fellow Cold War conservative Ronald Reagan, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Perhaps that will be enough for some viewers to cut him some slack. But after you've watched Heston run through his classic NRA routine ("They'll get my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.") at a couple pro-gun rallies in towns where kids have just shot kids dead, you're pretty much ready to forget the slack and take him up on his offer. When Moore finally corners him, for whatever reason, Heston seems confused by the ethical rather than ideological approach to the topic of gun ownership. The effect, after all the smoke and fire of his official pronouncements, is of the little man exposed behind the curtain: Hest can't get his Moses mojo going, and he leaves Moore, and the audience, dumbfounded: we are left fearful for the soul of an old man with blood on his hands.