Show the Carnage: Time for Americans to see the true result of mass shootings
Last edited Fri Feb 16, 2018, 08:38 PM - Edit history (1)
Slate
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For all of the killing, though, it’s striking how little Americans have actually seen of the violence. We are shown the aftermath, and sometimes—as with Parkland—we see victims hiding or escaping. But we don’t see what the bullets actually do. We don’t see the crumpled bodies or the bloody hallways, the mutilation that results when a medium-caliber round leaves a high-powered rifle and strikes a living person, tearing flesh, destroying bone, and leaving them either dead or gravely wounded. For the public, mass shootings are bloodless.
That might be part of the problem. Simply hearing about another shooting—seeing the familiar footage on television—has not been enough to turn ordinary Americans into activists or even single-issue voters. Maybe we need to see the results of our choices—of our policies—to prompt a change.
As attorney general, Eric Holder saw the carnage of Sandy Hook firsthand. “If the American people had access to those pictures, if the American people had seen those pictures, the calls for reasonable gun safety measures would have been passed,” Holder said in a 2016 interview. “If members of Congress perhaps had a chance to see those pictures and see what happened to those little angels I think we would’ve seen a different result.”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, California Sen. Kamala Harris, a former district attorney, echoed that sentiment. “As a prosecutor … I had to look at autopsy photographs. When you see the effect of this extreme violence on a human body, and especially the body of a child, maybe it will shock some people into understanding this cannot be a political issue. We have to be practical.”
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The fight to pass a federal anti-lynching law stalled for decades before it was propelled, in part, by gruesome images of Southern lynchings, printed in newspapers and circulated by black activists and sympathetic allies. The horrific violence done to Emmett Till, captured in photos and published for the world to see, helped energize the civil rights movement. There is no firm empirical relationship between press coverage and the public’s turn against the Vietnam War, but images of fighting and death played a real part in pushing some Americans from quiet disagreement to staunch opposition. Images from Abu Ghraib contributed to the wide sense among Americans that U.S. officials were condoning torture in Iraq. And more recently, graphic videos and images from police shootings of black Americans have galvanized a broad protest movement and led to real change in public opinion.
More at link
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/its-time-to-show-the-carnage-of-mass-shootings.html?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=traffic&utm_source=TheAngle_newsletter&sid=589dfd6ebcb59c58118b45d5
Edited to add: I can see both sides, and I do not have an answer to this. I do respect Kamala Harris and Eric Holder, and they have a valid point worth considering, and yet...I also respect the right to privacy of families who have been torn apart and would not want to see it handled in a way that added any more agony than they are already suffering. This is not a question with an easy answer.
= new reply since forum marked as read
to it. I, personally, can only dimly “imagine” what an AR-15 does to human flesh, but as I say, it’s a very dim and fuzzy picture. A dose of bloody reality would surely wake some people UP
-sigh-
OK with mass shooters, bump-stocks, murderers, and an increasing number of white wing gun-humpers like this:
NRA board members like this:
Mass Murderers like this:
Gun Humping dads indoctrinating their kids into gun culture:
Anti-government types like this:
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More ignorant gun-strokers:
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