Flint Police kick door down, arrest barricaded gunman on Flint's north side

Flint Police work to detain a barricaded gunman from inside a home on the 600 block of West Rankin Street on Friday, Aug. 1, 2014 on Flint's north side. The police were initially responding to a shots-fired call, and arrested the man. Nobody was injured. Jake May | MLive.com

(File photo | Mlive Media Group)

FLINT, MI -- It's just a T-shirt, right?



Can't hurt anybody.



I saw it on Friday. I was walking through the Back to the Bricks festivities, interviewing car enthusiasts and spectators. Downtown Flint was pulsing. Music played, muscle car engines revved, families pushed strollers and planted camping chairs on Saginaw Street to see the action.

Downtown was filled with exactly the kind of energy people here used to pray for, dream about, invest in. Yes, there's a lot of work left to do -- and a lot of neighborhoods haven't gotten the same attention -- but Flint is in many ways a changed city.



I remember as a teenager, in the early 2000s, coming downtown to see bands play. At the time, the act seemed defiant and dangerous. Downtown was gritty and silent, stores were boarded up, pedestrians were scarce. A lot has changed. Walking through Flint on Friday, downtown seemed about as gritty as Mackinac Island.



For most people, this is a good thing. This is progress.



I was thinking about this when I came across a rack of merchandise being sold on the street during the Bricks events. They were T-shirts advertising Flint. Sort of.



The real subject of this apparel was Flint's violent reputation. I'm sure you've seen it before. It's been around, there are several iterations. Some shirts say "Murderville" or "most violent city," some simply have the word "Flint" alongside a drawing of a handgun or a bullet hole.



Bang bang. You're dead. People get killed here. Funny, huh?



Sure, they're meant to be jokes, a tongue-in-cheek riff on Flint's violent reputation. Maybe at first they seemed funny, or clever. That one where the "L" in Flint is a sideways gun. That's kind of cute, right?



But somewhere along the line, these shirts -- or hats or stickers or whatever -- have lost their cultural cachet. There was a time, maybe, when making a joke about murder was the only comfort in an endless winter of senseless violence. Some people might still feel this way.



But standing at Back to the Bricks -- surrounded by families and priceless cars and guys in Hawiian shirts doing the cupid shuffle -- those shirts seem kind of silly.



At Flint City T-Shirts, owner Mike Clark has refused to carry any designs that emphasize the city's violence.



Instead, the downtown business sells shirts with logos like "Flint Strong" and "Flint. It's all good."



"We all live here, we work here. Promoting violence doesn't seem to be in our best interests," Clark said.



Clark said it's OK to acknowledge the city's hardships without celebrating the violence. For example, he sells a popular design with the words "Flint: The toughest town around since 1855."



"You can be tough without having to be violent," he said. "Tough implies that you can survive whatever happens and keep going."



To top it off, I haven't really seen many Flint natives wearing this kind of apparel. What I've seen are people with it who are, quite frankly, like me: white people who grew up in earshot of Flint's problems while not actually being subject to any sort of danger. When this is your context, maybe it's easy to horse around with Flint's bloody reputation. But if you live here -- if, say, your little brother was shot and killed just the other day -- maybe it's not so fun anymore.



I asked Gordon Young what he thought of the subject. As the man behind the popular blog Flint Expats and the author of "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," Young has seen his share of Flint cultural depictions over the years.



"If you or a friend or a family member have been the victim of gun violence in Flint or anywhere else, it's not a joke or something you want to memorialize with an ironic T-shirt," Young said. "I obviously haven't done a survey on this or anything, but I'd guess that most of the people wearing this stuff don't really have to deal with violence on a regular basis. They are trying to gain some sort of street cred by associating themselves with the rougher side of Flint. Or they're just mocking Flint. Trying to sugarcoat Flint's well-documented problems doesn't help, but glorifying the violence that plagues the city is even worse. But that's just the opinion of some dude who left Flint in 1986 and lives in San Francisco now."



Young and Clark both make good points. And obviously wearing a different T-shirt won't get people to stop killing each other. That's a whole different, more complex problem.



A lot of people may prefer to ignore the violence, or brush it under the rug. That's not what I'm asking. This isn't about turning a blind eye to Flint's problems or waving the banner of "vibrancy" while teenagers in other neighborhoods are gunned down in the street. This is about choosing what to celebrate. This is about knowing what's funny.



And what's not.





Blake Thorne is a reporter for MLive-The Flint Journal. Contact him at bthorne1@mlive.com or 810-347-8194. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.