This past weekend, I saw what was perhaps one of the most important films of the Post-9/11 generation. Guerilla filmmaker Michael Moore's newest documentary, "Bowling for Columbine," is a film that every person in our age group needs to see, regardless of political affiliation.

We all remember too well the massacre of Columbine High School in 1999. Immediately after it occurred some government officials and segments of the media began to point fingers. What caused such a tragedy. Movies? Music? Video Games? The parents?

In this film, Moore doesn't set out to really answer this question because he learns shortly into it that he can't. In Moore's opinion, bowling could be the root of this evil. It was the one activity that Klebold and Harris went to before they arrived at school that day to murder 14 of their classmates and one teacher.

The problem is we have developed into this "shoot first ask questions later" society and no one wants to take responsibility anymore. In one scene, students who were injured in Columbine High School went to K-Mart headquarters to protest the sale of bullets. After getting the runaround from K-Marts PR dept, Moore took the kids to the local K-Marts so they could purchase thousands of rounds of ammunition. Only after these boxes of bullets were delivered to K-Mart did the corporation realize that they have a serious problem to contend with.

These were naturally the same kind of bullets Klebold and Harris used in the Columbine massacre.

Moore doesn't argue for gun control but for people control, and I agree. Instead of retreating to find a quick fix like we tend to do in this country, we should instead be analyzing the complexities of this situation. The largest American air-strike on Kosovo took place the day of the Columbine massacre. Any right of center mind would say that any correlation between the two is a stretch, but I disagree. What kind of message are we sending to our public? What kind of fear and uncertainty are we producing when our news broadcasts speak of murders and terrorist threats first and everything else later. Moore's film showed that we really are the only country that does this - is it any surprise then that we have almost 11,000 more gun-related deaths last year than Britain?

It upsets me to hear people dismiss Moore's work as liberal garbage because he is one of the few people out there in this time of near-nauseating patriotism WHO is still willing to tell us the truth. An employee of a nuclear-weapons facility near Columbime declared the US a country that thinks before it acts. This was quickly refuted by a Moore-constructed montage of moments of history where our countries actions led to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians - the last few images being how we gave the Taliban millions of dollars to fight against Russia in the eighties, and naturally, a shot of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center - the only moment in the montage that depicted death on American soil.

I urge members of the Adelphi community to go to Manhattan as soon as they can and see a screening of this movie. As our country insists on going to war with Iraq, and as a sniper continues to terrorize a suburban neighborhood, a film like this provides important context for the society in which we live . If you're put off by Moore's aggressive behavior, just remember that he is trying to inform and persuade.

You should do yourself a favor and get informed soon, or you may be the next individual who is caught up in the evils of bowling.