GRAPHIC IMAGE: What the reports on Allen TX aren't showing us. TRIGGER WARNING

[wnylib]

99. It is naive to think that the families

just won't have to look.

A mother is in the checkout line at the supermarket, maybe for the first time in weeks or months that she feels able to get out and mingle in the world. She's relaxed and compartmentalized the loss of her child just enough to cope. As she turns to put items from her cart onto the belt that moves items up to the cashier, there is a full front page photo on a magazine rack at the register of her dead child for a follow up story. She feels blindsided, loses focus, gets a panicky felting in her gut, can't breathe, needs to get out of there. She abandons her cart, goes outside. It will be weeks before she feels able to go out again.

She goes home and hears reports on her car radio about the same follow up story that the magazine photo was about. She changes the station. At least there was no picture since it was radio.

She turns on her TV at home for distraction. There's a breaking news story about an update regarding the mass shooting that killed her child. On the screen is an enlarged photo of her 6 year old's mutilated body. She turns off the TV.

Update stories are to be expected. Much as she hates to have it all dredged up, she knows this will happen over and over. She can learn to shut it out and compartmentalize it. If that's all she had to deal with, she would make slow, steady progress in healing.

But it's the pictures that destroy her. She cannot unsee what she has already seen, and what continually crops up unexpectedly, catching her off guard at the grocery store, at home on her TV. She cannot console herself with memories and pictures of happier times because the bloody, faceless image pops up every time she looks at a picture of her child.

She goes through this because somebody believed that it was their right to shock the public with graphic images of her baby without a face, drenched in blood. But all the images have achieved in the public sphere is continued debates and arguments about gun rights. Added to those arguments are mocking sneers and claims that the photos were fakes.

Everywhere she goes, the images pop up on magazine racks, public TVs in the doctor's office, at the library, and in the break room on her job. They're on the Internet. She withdraws to shield herself. Lunch alone at her desk or in her car at work. Her marriage is strained. Some of this would have happened even without the pictures. She could cope with that. But she can't shield her other children from seeing the gory images of their sister. She was helpless to save her daughter and is now helpless to protect her living children.

Her life is a nightmare with no end.