Buffalo, New York. Uvalde, Texas. Tulsa, Oklahoma. A month ago, none of these towns had news of anything notable, but now, they’re all sharing headlines for the same reason: every town has a discharge mass guns, all in the last month. And each time, we never really see what the carnage looks like. Now is the time to change that practice?
It is rare in the United States to see photographs of victims of gun violence. You’ll often see it in phone service pictures from other countries, but not the US, and the reasons for that are twofold. First, access to crime scenes is often restricted quickly, so journalists are often unable to enter. When they can get in, photos like this usually don’t pass what my college journalism professor calls the “Cheerios test.” It’s a question an editor who chooses to run a photo will ask himself: Would someone who ate cereal for breakfast throw up after seeing such a photo? In most cases, the answer is yes, they will, and so the photo usually doesn’t work.
That doesn’t mean there are no exceptions. What I remember best is 2012 photos that The New York Times Run of a man being shot near the Empire State Building. You can clearly see his face and a stream of blood from his head spills into the street. It’s a clear, visual reminder of what guns can do to people.
And with the latest series of mass shootings, it’s time to ask the question again: should these photos be released? Would seeing the bodies of children decimated by a rifle change the conversation? Is it enough to send a message to government officials that inaction, this time, is not the solution?
This photo editing problem is dissected by Elizabeth Williamson of The New York Timeswhere she interviewed experts and most notably the father of a child victim of the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut in 2012 about this very idea, about publishing photographs of children’s bodies shot to death in a normal school day.
Maybe I’m a journalist inside, but I rarely cry about news stories. The last time I remember doing it for a news story was one of those incidents where Williamson references in her workwhere a dead Syrian refugee, a three-year-old boy, washed ashore in Turkey in 2015.
I cried again when I heard Uvalde’s accounts of children about my son’s age smearing the blood of their murdered friends on themselves to look dead before the shooter as they repeatedly called 911, begging. help over a period of more than an hour. It is perhaps no coincidence that in both of these stories the victims were brown children my age. It doesn’t take empathy to be a parent to do something about these atrocities, but clearly, that hasn’t been enough in the past to motivate people and elected officials to act.
Maybe seeing the bullet-riddled body pictures of the kids was enough? Maybe not.
Please read Williamson’s piece above for a nuanced reception of this idea.
