Would public showing of images of gun violence help?

This issue is being considered now for some reason. Maybe the fairly close timing of recent mass shootings and murders of innocents is triggering some introspection at least in the mainstream media. Vanity Fair writes: 

“WE CANNOT SANITIZE THESE KILLINGS”: NEWS MEDIA CONSIDERS BREAKING GRIMLY ROUTINE COVERAGE OF MASS SHOOTINGS

As journalists descend on Uvalde—as they did on Columbine, Newtown, and Parkland—some are questioning whether a more graphic approach is required to capture the reality of America’s gun violence epidemic. “It’s time,” suggests one industry leader, “to show what a slaughtered 7-year-old looks like.”

The Texas Tribune’s staff has felt determined to aggressively cover this week’s horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, said editor in chief Sewell Chan, even as they are “exhausted that we have to cover this at all, exhausted that we have to cover this again, and resigned to taking part in what sometimes seems like a numb, meaningless ritual.” In newsrooms across America, a country where mass shootings have become a gruesome facet of daily life, the process has sadly become routine. “We all know the playbook by now. We all know how it unfolds,” Chan added. “The grief, the announcement, the outrage. Some semblance of public debate. And then generally no action. And that has been the pattern, really, for at least two decades, going back to Columbine.”

Indeed, as NPR national correspondent Sarah McCammon put it, “I was in high school when Columbine happened. I had a kindergartener during Sandy Hook. I have an elementary school student now. And I’ve covered so many of these.” With Tuesday’s killing of at least 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school coming on the heels of a mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket—and amid decades of recurring tragedies in Newtown, Parkland, and elsewhere—journalists and academics are questioning whether the traditional coverage model is adequately capturing the carnage, and even considering whether showing more graphic footage would force the public, and political leaders, to fully confront the sickening reality of America’s gun violence epidemic.

The New York Times writes: 

WASHINGTON — After Lenny Pozner’s six-year-old son Noah died at Sandy Hook, he briefly contemplated showing the world the damage an AR-15-style rifle did to his child.

His first thought: “It would move some people, change some minds.”

His second: “Not my kid.”

Grief and anger over two horrific mass shootings in Texas and New York only ten days apart has stirred an old debate: Would disseminating graphic images of the results of gun violence jolt the nation’s gridlocked leadership into action?

“What makes this a challenging ethics call is that when you’re a photo editor, you never really do know which is the photograph that is going to seem exploitative, and what image will touch the conscience of people and move the needle on the debate.”

Mainstream news organizations sometimes show disturbing images of people who have died to illustrate the horrors of an event, like the photograph by Lynsey Addario of a mother, two children and a family friend killed in March in Irpin, Ukraine, or the image of a three-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015. But they rarely show human gore.

“We’re always trying to balance the news value of an image and its service to our readers against whether or not the image is dignified for the victims or considerate toward the families or loved ones of those pictured,” said Meaghan Looram, the director of photography at The New York Times. “We don’t want to withhold images that would help people to understand what has happened in scenarios like these, but we also don’t publish images sheerly as provocation.” 

Noah Pozner was among the first children buried after the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which killed 20 first graders and six educators. Noah hid with 15 classmates in the classroom bathroom, a 4½ by 3½-foot space into which the gunman fired more than 80 rounds from a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle, killing all but one child.

Bullets tore through Noah’s back, arm, hand and face, destroying most of his jaw. Mr. Pozner and Noah’s mother, Veronique De La Rosa, held a private, open-coffin viewing before his funeral service, which was attended by Dannel Malloy, Connecticut’s governor at the time. When Mr. Malloy arrived, Ms. De La Rosa took him by the hand to see her son, lying in a mahogany coffin in a room at the back of a funeral home in Fairfield, Conn.  

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to pass out. She’s going to show me open wounds and I’m not going to handle it very well,’” Mr. Malloy said in an interview for my book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.”

The damage to Noah’s mouth was hidden by a square of white fabric, so Mr. Malloy was not shown raw wounds. “I wouldn’t have taken it to that level,” Ms. De La Rosa said. But the governor “was still looking at a dead child,” she said. “A child who practically the day before had been running around like a little locomotive, full of life.”  

After Sandy Hook, Connecticut passed some of the most stringent gun safety measures in the nation.

The cognitive biology of it

Human are visual creatures. The human mind is a story or narrative creating machine that operates automatically, fast and unconsciously. We respond to things we see at least as much as we do to things we hear. Without images of reality, people cannot understand that specific reality, but their minds create realities they are comfortable with. For most people, they do not conjure up images of bodies with bullet holes and blood. It is too uncomfortable to most many people to even think that, so they don't. Think of your own experiences. What images of bodies did you think of after hearing about the mass shooting in Uvalde, TX? I guarantee that your mental blankness on this point would not be nearly so blank if you had seen a couple of images of bloody, dead, bullet mangled children.

What a bullet does to living tissue

Yes, leave it to the family to decide whether to release photos or not. Some will not, some will. That would be the family's choice. But given America's gun violence situation, releasing the photos to the public is likely to be more beneficial than harmful. The families should at least have that right as an option to honor their murdered family member.

But do not leave it to the police, the NRA or the Republican Party. They will suppress all images they possibly can because they do not want the American people to see how hideous human on human violence actually is.

Firefighter carrying the body of 1-year-old Baylee Almon, who 

was fatally injured in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995

Acknowledgement: Thanks to SNOWFLAKE for raising this issue on his blog and citing the articles.