Yet another mass shooting….and the usual rhetoric around it….
This will be an emotional post if it upsets anyone I am sorry.
In my little corner of the country we have had two mass shootings in one week…..shootings are nothing new around here but ones with multiple victims is…..
In this country in the last two weeks, there have been nearly 200 people shot in mass-shooting incidents.
Some action is called for….thoughts an prayers is doing nothing to curb this disturbing trend….Congress is an impotent tool a society just looks the other way.
I had a conversation with a friend that believes the photos should be published for the public to see the carnage and that may turn the debate to decide to do something to help stop this carnage.
I also read a letter by William Falk published in The Week magazine……which I present here…..
When former police officer Stephen Spainhouer rushed to the scene of a mass shooting at an Allen, Texas, outlet mall last week, he came upon a battlefield. Bloody, torn bodies were scattered on the ground next to the dead killer and his assault rifle. A little girl seemed to be hiding next to a bush, but when Spainhouer turned her over, “she had no face.” He tried performing CPR on other victims, but “the injuries were so severe there was nothing I could do.” Hours later, cellphone images of the disfigured dead began circulating on Twitter. No mainstream publication, including this one, would publish such photos, for many reasons: the need for family consent; preserving the dignity of the dead; the sensibilities of readers. But by not showing what mass shooters do to human beings, do we make it easier to be numbed to the slaughter? If Americans were repeatedly exposed to images of children with their faces blown off, would they still accept that “nothing can be done?”
Images have great power; they can reach into hearts and minds in a way words often do not. When Emmett Till’s mother allowed publication of photos of her late son’s mutilated face in 1955, the revulsion galvanized the civil rights movement. Other photos have also marked turning points in history: the 1972 image of a naked, 9-year-old Vietnamese girl burned by U.S. napalm; the 2004 photos of Iraqis humiliated and tortured by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison; the video of a police officer with his knee on the neck of a pleading, dying George Floyd. What if we’d seen what an assault rifle did to the 20 first-graders and six adults in Newtown? (Some of their bodies had to be identified by DNA.) Or the 19 kids and two teachers methodically executed in Uvalde? Or the 26 churchgoers massacred in the pews at Sutherland Springs? Would their gruesome deaths still be written off as the regrettable but necessary price of “freedom”?
Interesting thought.
For me after Vietnam there is not much that shocks me…..so I say yes….of course with permission to use the photos.
I do not think it will make much difference to our lay-about lawmakers for their concerns are with donor dollars not the safety of our citizens.
What about you, my readers, should these photos be published?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
I agree with you. Our leadership hasn’t listened to the outcry to “do something”. The only outcry they will recognize is at the ballot box…well…unless they dispute the election outcome.
I am not sure the vote can solve this problem, anymore. chuq
They should seek parental permission, then release the photos widely. Even then, I personally doubt anything will be done about gun laws, but it might provoke a public reaction that begins to change ideas.
Best wishes, Pete.
That is what I was thinking….if people could see what the damage looks like then maybe a change could be started. chuq
It’s a bit of a tough call, and not because the photos themselves might offend, but more along the lines of loved ones of the deceased person(s) seeing their loved one in the position and condition of their death. Going back to WW2 it was Roosevelt who kept photos of dead Marines floating in the ocean surf from being released to the public, both for families recognizing their dead family members, and mostly for the risk of shifting public opinion against the war at a time when the nation needed focus and determination to win.
There is also the situation where children (and vulnerable adults) can be traumatized (and don’t kid yourself, kids will get photos like this if released). Just presenting the usual disclaimer warnings in advance will not insulate the public. More often than not (and morbid or not) there is a general natural curiosity we humans have have on the ways people can die. So if the ultimate goal of making such photos public is to get some emotional shock and awe to force lawmakers to act, it will not be as universally effective as we might think.
Now what I think is effective is what the mother of that boy, Emmett Till, did back in the 50’s as cited in your post. She allowed a photo of her son in the casket with his mangled up head due to the racial beating. If I were the parent of that young female victim in Allen, TX, I would be sorely tempted to give some measure of value/meaning to her death with making public a photo of her in a casket with her missing face… or even place a family photo of her over her face, obviously there symbolically to hide her appearance.
Like I say….something needs to shock the people into some sort of concern….now it is so much blase…..just another shooting how terrible……chuq
The photos should be published in full color with as many close ups as possible with no fuzzy bubbles covering up anything disgusting — It cannot be any more frightening or shocking than some of the realistic special effects in horror movies — and, of course, it would serve as no deterrent whatever and it would not move any legislators any further off their intransigent asses as they have always been –In fact, after a while, these kinds of pictures would come to be accepted by observers as the new normal and sooner or later people would find them more boring than shocking. So yes, let’s do it! Better yet, let us publish close ups of the slain killers in these instances –so that potential killers might get the message of what could happen to them if they try something like a mass shooting. But I suspect that most mass shooters go about their mayhem with the idea of getting killed anyway so maybe publishing their dead carcasses wouldn’t have much effect after all.
There is a need…thoughts and prayers is a cop out. chuq
Nevertheless, thoughts and prayers are what we have and thoughts and prayers are what we are always going to get. I agree they are a cop out.
It is so damn sad. chuq
Let us see the bits and pieces!
Americans cannot handle the truth…..chuq
This is such a tough one. I’ve gone back and forth on this.
Thanx for your visit and comment…..chuq