FLINT, MI -- A deadly weekend shooting inside a Flint church has been met locally with disbelief that such a horrific act could happen in a house of worship.

But outside Genesee County, reports of the church shooting on Saturday, Jan. 12, have largely been ignored.

"Why isn't there a national reaction? Well, I think it's who and where," said Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton. "It's happening in the city and large numbers of homicides happen in cities. People just aren't paying much attention to it."

But Leyton said Steven E. Lawson's slaying at a church funeral should send a message that Flint needs help from "the highest levels of government."

Lawson, 28, was shot to death just outside the sanctuary of Full Gospel Christian Church on King Avenue near Home Avenue Saturday, Jan. 12, while attending the funeral for Gerrell Tyler.

Tyler became Flint's record-tying 66th homicide of 2012 when he was killed Dec. 30.

Police say they know the motive for Lawson's slaying at the shooting but have not commented on it. No arrests have been made.

Other reasons for the lack of attention to the church shooting, said Leyton, are the fact that there was only one victim and it happened in a black community.

"And I'm not talking about the lack of attention in the media, but at the highest levels of government. We could use some help and resources," said Leyton.

One reason for the lack of national attention to the Flint shooting is that there have been other shootings at churches in the recent past, said University of Michigan-Flint journalism professor Michael Lewis. In some there were multiple victims, such as the one in the Sikh temple in Wisconsin in August that claimed seven lives. There was also a shooting during a funeral in Chicago last November.

"A sad commentary, but it seems we're becoming desensitized to shootings in churches, schools and any other places considered sanctuaries in the good, old days," Michael Lewis said an e-mail to an MLive-Flint Journal reporter. "It's just that, on a national level, a church shooting isn't very unusual -- thus newsworthy -- anymore."

The de-sensitization stretches beyond crime, said Sarah Reckhow, assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University.

"I think there is a de-sensitization to crime, low academic achievement, budget deficits (in cities), it's not just isolated to crime," she said. "We have a compartmentalized, 'that's not my problem' way of thinking."

U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint, said he is "deeply saddened" by the church shooting.

"Unfortunately, cities like Flint know all too well how such terrible acts of violence take a toll on our communities. We can – and must – do more to prevent gun violence in our cities. Every day on our nation's streets, 33 people are senselessly murdered by gun violence. Senseless shootings, like that happened this past weekend, cannot become the norm. Our children should have the freedom to live in their communities without fear of being gunned down."

Flint City Council President Scott Kincaid said the shooting at the church, and the other homicides that have taken place this year, are unacceptable.

"I think that, when you have a shooting like in a school or a church or a theater like that, whether it's a mass shooting or a random shooting of anybody, it doesn't matter how many -- it speaks to one thing: the violence in the community," Kincaid said.

Tokaye Murray, of Flint, called the shooting "messed up."

"Yes, it's very (shameful), it's stupid because somebody's attending another person's funeral and they get killed at that person's funeral -- it was just ignorant," she said.

Flint Police Chief Alvern Lock said he's addressed time and again what needs to take place to change the culture of violence in the city.

"It's like I've been saying all along and I continue to repeat myself. Someone knows what's going and what was going to happen," he said. "They need to call us and let us know.

"This was not a random act. No one walked into the church and decided to pick somebody out," Lock said. "There's somebody there that knew who it was. It wasn't two strangers."

Flint Journal staff writers Eric Chiu and Roberto Acosta contributed to this report.