You must have heard the story in the last few days about the little boy, six years old, who killed the little girl, six years old, in Flint, Michigan, an incredible story.

Well, looking at the New York Daily News today, it says he didn’t pull the trigger, but authorities say a nineteen-year-old man should go to jail for letting the little boy get hold of the pistol he used this week to kill a six-year-old classmate. Jamelle James, who police say left a handgun under blankets on his bed, was arraigned on a charge of involuntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of fifteen years in prison. The boy, who lived in the same house as Jamelle, found the gun on Tuesday, took it to the Theo Buell Elementary School and fatally shot classmate Kayla Rolland.

Well, Michael Moore, the filmmaker and media critic, wrote a very interesting piece that has been floating around the web. You know that Michael comes from Flint, Michigan and was editor of the Flint Voice for many, many years and did the film Roger & Me about going after Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors. This is a letter that he wrote just after the shooting. He says:

“Dear friends,



“I tried to write this letter to you last night, but the level of sadness in me would not allow me to sit at this keyboard and compose these words.



“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 — love it more than any of you will ever know — 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,” — the movie that Michael did, he says — “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. […]



“Buell Elementary, where the shooting took place, is in the Flint Beecher school district, the poorest school district in Genesee County, Michigan, and perhaps the poorest in the entire state. Eighty-two percent of its children, according to the federal government, live below the ‘official’ poverty level (meaning the number of kids in total poverty is even higher).



“Beecher is Flint’s dump. It is where you go when you have nothing left to your name. 60 percent black, 40 percent white. 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. It covers a small portion of two different townships (one of which is where my wife Kathleen is from). 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 yesterday 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 find themselves in bed with General Motors and, like Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, repeatedly deny that people of their own race have anything to do with them.”

And it goes on from there, a letter from Michael Moore after he heard about the shooting by a six-year-old of a six-year-old in Flint, Michigan.