This is among the first of many emotion laden articles advocating the banning of handguns that will result from the terrible death of the six year old girl in Flint, Michigan. They just don't get it.
Please email this man, and drop a letter to the editor of our liberal rag, and set them straight with links, logic, and facts. These people aren't used to facts, and we need to help them. Be gentle
Link: http://www.oregonlive.com/oped/index.ssf?/oped/00/03/ed030312.frame
The Oregonian: March 3, 2000
MICHAEL MOORE
Suffer the children, and a whole community, too.
How much more can my hometown take? How much more do the people we love have to suffer?
Isn't it enough that tens of thousands of lives in Flint have been wrecked, destroyed by the greed of General Motors? Isn't it enough that my wife and I and tens of thousands of others who love our home have had to leave Flint in the past 20 years to find work far from family and friends? Isn't it enough that Flint suffers the highest or near-highest per-capita rates of murder, rape and theft in the nation?
I thought there was nothing else left for Flint to go through. Like Job, it seemed that every imaginable sorrow had been visited upon its people. I guess I was wrong.
I look up at the TV and a helicopter is hovering over a school while the words "Buell Elementary" flash on the screen.
Buell? Buell! At the end of "The Big One," when I twisted Nike chairman Phil Knight's arm to match my $10,000 contribution to the kids of Flint -- that $20,000 went to Buell Elementary.
Tuesday, a 6-year-old boy brought a semi-automatic gun to that very school in Flint and killed a 6-year-old girl in their first-grade classroom, a little girl named Kayla Rolland.
That's about the only thing the national media got right about the story.
You have probably heard that this school shooting happened in a place called Mount Morris Township, somewhere near Flint.
There is no such place.
Buell Elementary is in the Flint Beecher school district, the poorest school district in Genesee County, Mich. The Beecher part of Flint Beecher is Flint's dump. It is where you go when you have nothing left to your name, 60 percent black, 40 percent white; 82 percent of its children living below the official poverty level. No municipality in Genesee County wants to govern Beecher, so it exists as a No Man's Land on the northern city limits of Flint. But folks, when you hear the word "township" used in the case of Beecher, those of us from Flint mean it in the way the word was used in South Africa. Buell Elementary in the Flint Beecher school district has a Flint address and a Flint phone number, but the black officials from Flint on the news tried to point out that "this school really isn't in Flint!" It is amazing how deep oppression takes its roots when even black leaders repeatedly deny that people of their own race have anything to do with them.
Poor, poor Flint. The media blowhards babble on about how "this is the youngest child to kill another child in a school shooting" and the few anchors who started to look at their own helicopter shots showing the school sitting in the middle of a bombed-out neighborhood commented that "this is actually the first of all these school shootings we've had lately that has taken place in an 'urban' school." Wow. Two records for Flint in one day.
Homeless and fatherless (his dad is in jail as 30 percent of all black men in America will be at some point in their lives), the boy was staying at a flophouse. In the house were guns, as there are in virtually every home in this devastated and desperate area. The gun, that the boy found and took to school, was not some "junk gun," the kind that Al Gore promises to get rid of. It was a gun with a brand name bought initially at a sporting goods store.
How do John McCain and George W. Bush feel this morning? Just seven days prior, John McCain's "Straight Talk Express" bus rolled past Beecher on Interstate 75, but it didn't stop. It rolled on down near Ann Arbor where McCain blasted those who seek gun control, any gun control. Bush never stopped in Flint, either.
I'll end by repeating what I have said many times before: The handguns have to go. The fact is, 16,000 Americans died of gun murders last year.
That is the fact. Easy access to guns by a species that often responds irrationally and with intense emotions is a lethal combination.
Let the hunters keep their rifles after a serious background check, but the handguns, whose only purpose is to take a human life, must go. The Brits have done it, the Australians have done it, the Canadians have done it. Even New York City mostly did it, and the number of murders there has dropped from 2,200 a year to 600.
What are we waiting for? Another Kayla Rolland? God help you if you ever have to live in a township that no town will claim and is forgotten by everyone else as soon as the next gun nut enters a McDonald's and a Burger King on the same day. Fried or flame-broiled, it's all our own unique American Hell.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Filmmaker Michael Moore can be reached at MMFlint@aol.com; his Web site address is http://www.michaelmoore.com.
Please email this man, and drop a letter to the editor of our liberal rag, and set them straight with links, logic, and facts. These people aren't used to facts, and we need to help them. Be gentle
Link: http://www.oregonlive.com/oped/index.ssf?/oped/00/03/ed030312.frame
The Oregonian: March 3, 2000
MICHAEL MOORE
Suffer the children, and a whole community, too.
How much more can my hometown take? How much more do the people we love have to suffer?
Isn't it enough that tens of thousands of lives in Flint have been wrecked, destroyed by the greed of General Motors? Isn't it enough that my wife and I and tens of thousands of others who love our home have had to leave Flint in the past 20 years to find work far from family and friends? Isn't it enough that Flint suffers the highest or near-highest per-capita rates of murder, rape and theft in the nation?
I thought there was nothing else left for Flint to go through. Like Job, it seemed that every imaginable sorrow had been visited upon its people. I guess I was wrong.
I look up at the TV and a helicopter is hovering over a school while the words "Buell Elementary" flash on the screen.
Buell? Buell! At the end of "The Big One," when I twisted Nike chairman Phil Knight's arm to match my $10,000 contribution to the kids of Flint -- that $20,000 went to Buell Elementary.
Tuesday, a 6-year-old boy brought a semi-automatic gun to that very school in Flint and killed a 6-year-old girl in their first-grade classroom, a little girl named Kayla Rolland.
That's about the only thing the national media got right about the story.
You have probably heard that this school shooting happened in a place called Mount Morris Township, somewhere near Flint.
There is no such place.
Buell Elementary is in the Flint Beecher school district, the poorest school district in Genesee County, Mich. The Beecher part of Flint Beecher is Flint's dump. It is where you go when you have nothing left to your name, 60 percent black, 40 percent white; 82 percent of its children living below the official poverty level. No municipality in Genesee County wants to govern Beecher, so it exists as a No Man's Land on the northern city limits of Flint. But folks, when you hear the word "township" used in the case of Beecher, those of us from Flint mean it in the way the word was used in South Africa. Buell Elementary in the Flint Beecher school district has a Flint address and a Flint phone number, but the black officials from Flint on the news tried to point out that "this school really isn't in Flint!" It is amazing how deep oppression takes its roots when even black leaders repeatedly deny that people of their own race have anything to do with them.
Poor, poor Flint. The media blowhards babble on about how "this is the youngest child to kill another child in a school shooting" and the few anchors who started to look at their own helicopter shots showing the school sitting in the middle of a bombed-out neighborhood commented that "this is actually the first of all these school shootings we've had lately that has taken place in an 'urban' school." Wow. Two records for Flint in one day.
Homeless and fatherless (his dad is in jail as 30 percent of all black men in America will be at some point in their lives), the boy was staying at a flophouse. In the house were guns, as there are in virtually every home in this devastated and desperate area. The gun, that the boy found and took to school, was not some "junk gun," the kind that Al Gore promises to get rid of. It was a gun with a brand name bought initially at a sporting goods store.
How do John McCain and George W. Bush feel this morning? Just seven days prior, John McCain's "Straight Talk Express" bus rolled past Beecher on Interstate 75, but it didn't stop. It rolled on down near Ann Arbor where McCain blasted those who seek gun control, any gun control. Bush never stopped in Flint, either.
I'll end by repeating what I have said many times before: The handguns have to go. The fact is, 16,000 Americans died of gun murders last year.
That is the fact. Easy access to guns by a species that often responds irrationally and with intense emotions is a lethal combination.
Let the hunters keep their rifles after a serious background check, but the handguns, whose only purpose is to take a human life, must go. The Brits have done it, the Australians have done it, the Canadians have done it. Even New York City mostly did it, and the number of murders there has dropped from 2,200 a year to 600.
What are we waiting for? Another Kayla Rolland? God help you if you ever have to live in a township that no town will claim and is forgotten by everyone else as soon as the next gun nut enters a McDonald's and a Burger King on the same day. Fried or flame-broiled, it's all our own unique American Hell.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Filmmaker Michael Moore can be reached at MMFlint@aol.com; his Web site address is http://www.michaelmoore.com.