Warning: this article does NOT include graphic images… but it should
For school shootings, showing the true carnage could sway the gun control debate
The American press observes a few historical traditions of decorum. Suicides are not considered news. The names of sexual assault victims are not published. And readers won’t be exposed to gory photographs from crime scenes.
But these rules also have exceptions. A suicide will get covered if the decedent is a public figure, or if the act happened in a public forum. A rape victim can be identified if she or he chooses to come forward. And there have been a few significant moments in American history when editors and news producers have made the considered decision to print or broadcast grisly images that turn the stomach, jar the public into action, and sometimes even change the course of history.
Published photos of modern school shootings have thus far been limited to familiar and even tasteful images: yellow crime scene tape; orderly lines of students evacuating buildings; the faces of a few tearful survivors. But a new precedent needs to be set. It’s time for editors and producers to dispense with the decorum, to stop worrying about making readers queasy or uncomfortable, to depict what truly happens to the head of the debate team captain after a hollow-point 9mm bullet causes it to explode like a melon. The time has come for those who control what we see — and what we don’t — to look to a few historic examples of the outcry and social change that can result from such a decision.
The foremost example of this dynamic comes from the civil rights era, when Jet magazine ran photos of the bloated and ruined corpse of 14-year-old Emmett Till, lynched by drowning in Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River for the crime of acting fresh toward a white woman in a country store. “Let the people see what I’ve seen,” said the boy’s mother, Mamie, in explaining her decision to allow the photo to run, and to hold an open-casket funeral.
Another well-known example was the hanging of 17-year-old Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, in 1908 — a not atypical fate for African American felony suspects in the South at the time. A postcard photographer named Fred Gildersleeve captured the pathetic image of Washington hauled up against a tree while a crowd of men — many of them grinning — looked on. The photos were meant to be “commemorative.” But a researcher named Elisabeth Freeman did a story for The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, illustrated with a sequence of photos of Washington’s suffering from Gildersleeve’s pitiless lens. The response galvanized anti-lynching efforts in the North, and the NAACP rose in prominence.
As Jamelle Bouie recently argued in Slate, the reality of American torture policies in Iraq became widely acknowledged only after the publication of the dehumanizing photos from Abu Ghraib prison. The same goes for the graphic and indisputable images and video footage of police shooting blameless African American suspects such as Walter Scott, whose shooter, in a rare case of justice for such victims and their families, was convicted.
Shots of dead children carry a particular potency: Kevin Carter’s 1993 picture of a dying Sudanese child crawling toward a United Nations feeding center while being watched by a vulture was splashed on anti-famine posters all over the world. Echoes of that image were also present in the widely disseminated news photo of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi lying facedown on a Turkish beach.
Why do disturbing images succeed when words fail, especially in nonviolent movements?
In a provocative 1998 book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, the heart surgeon and philosopher Leonard Shlain spelled out a theory explaining why images — whether paintings, photos, or movies — are often more persuasive in arguments oriented toward peace: they land in the right side of the brain, which values harmony, inclusiveness, and intuition. Written words, by contrast, inform left-brain thinking, which relies upon Cartesian logic, strict categories, and aggression. Part of the reason American resolve faltered in the Vietnam War, he argues, was the predominance of television pictures from the jungles that turned citizens against the war (as did photos like Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl”). The most television-oriented president in history, Donald Trump, reportedly watches as much as eight hours of moving images a day. There is evidence that this heavy diet has affected policy. Pictures of an ex-wife’s black eye forced the White House to admit that it had shielded a probable domestic abuser. Photographs of sarin gas victims convinced Trump to fire missiles at Syria.
As history has shown, pictures have power to put meaning around numb words like “killed,” “slain,” and even “massacred.” There is a reason why criminal defense attorneys will always fight to keep a jury from seeing photos of mangled victims at crime scenes or on autopsy tables. The visuals tell us what the words invariably soften: the optic nerve is the pathway for revulsion and anger.
As trauma surgeons can attest, the damage done by bullets from combat-style weapons, which can reduce organs to shreds, is horrific. “The tissue destruction is almost unimaginable,” Dr. Jeremy Cannon, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told the New York Times. “Bones are exploded, soft tissue is absolutely destroyed. The injuries to the chest or abdomen — it’s like a bomb went off.”
Some might argue that children ought to be shielded from these disturbing visions. But many of them are used to watching buckets of fake blood spilled in movies and on television, not to mention in video games. A glimpse at the real thing — in the context of real suffering — could take guns out of the realm of the fun and the romantic and lead us to a better understanding of their role in taking innocent lives. Exposure would be far more beneficial than traumatic: it might just help point younger generations toward the change that prevents violence.
But isn’t it illegal? Not really. The First Amendment offers broad protection for publishing the faces of minors without parental consent. But some school districts have rules against photographing students on school property, and the emergence of social media may push state legislatures into curtailing the distribution of child photos. We can’t expect every parent of a slain child to follow the lead of Mamie Till. The press can, however, publish images — professional or amateur — that push the boundaries of their long-practiced decorum; after all, a faraway shot of a bulging body bag being wheeled on a gurney through a playground would be more powerful than what we currently see. The news media could also do a better job of steering us toward photos and video posted by minors who filmed the carnage.
If the public could actually see the damage done to a body by a semi-automatic rifle instead of reading sanitized verbal constructions, there is good historical precedent to suggest that the resulting discomfort would break the stranglehold of the gunmaker lobby on Congress. It’s time we take a cue from the images that have made us squirm but also made history. Now more than ever, America needs to see what our catastrophic Constitution-twisting has brought us. It’s time to take a good, long look at that high school junior with a bullet between her eyes.
Tom Zoellner is an associate professor of English at Chapman University
At Timeline, we reveal the forces that shaped America’s past and present. Our team and the Timeline community are scouring archives for the most visually arresting and socially important stories, and using them to explain how we got to now. To help us tell more stories, please consider becoming a Timeline member.
