The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
When I was about 10 years old, my uncle, drunk and distressed — as most of my male relatives were in those days — put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was found by his two pre-teen children, blood and brains all over the room. Naturally, they were never the same. How could you be after seeing such brutality?
The first responders who went into the Uvalde, Texas, elementary schoolroom and saw the damage a high-velocity, high-capacity weapon does to a classroom of fourth graders also will never be the same. Certain things, after all, you cannot un-see.
Unfortunately, the rest of us — especially lawmakers — will never see that carnage, so, just like after Sandy Hook, Columbine and Parkland, nothing will change. In the United States we accept massacred children as the price of the Second Amendment.
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I think it’s time to remedy that. I want the folks for whom guns are God and the legislators who bow at the altar of the National Rifle Association to see — as a Texas sheriff described to reporters — “piles of children,” bloodied and covered by the lifeless bodies of teachers trying to protect them. I want them to see tiny humans so destroyed by an AR-15 that they had to be matched to their parents by DNA samples because they were unidentifiable any other way.
Graphic images have changed public policy in the past.
Pressure to end the Vietnam War spiked when a photograph of a naked, screaming girl running from her napalmed village was distributed throughout the world on newspaper wire services.
The civil rights movement was sparked by photos in 1955 of a 14-year-old boy who’d been brutally murdered by a group of white men for flirting with a white woman. Emmett Till’s mother chose an open casket so photographers — and thus the world — could see her child’s mutilated face.
Most recently, a 9-minute cell phone video in 2020 of a cop casually kneeling on George Floyd’s neck brought sweeping reforms to Minneapolis policing and launched a nationwide conversation into police brutality.
Perhaps photos of the Uvalde classroom scene, blown up on banners and paraded in front of Congress, state legislatures, the NRA headquarters and corporate offices of gun manufacturers — like aborted-fetus photos in front of abortion clinics — could change hearts and minds so legislators finally do something about this insanity.
I get that guns don’t kill people — people kill people — but it’s also true that a person can’t do what happened in that Texas classroom with a broom, a bat, nunchuks, his bare hands or even a machete. Heck, the fact that 19 armed law enforcement officers didn’t break down a door because two of their officers had been injured by bullets coming through that door speaks volumes about how dangerous AR-15s are. (It also pretty much obliterates the ‘good guys with guns’ argument.)
Yes, it’s not just guns. It’s also absent fathers, mental health issues, isolation, bullying, the lunacy of social media, understaffed school counseling offices and YouTube channels that foment anger and hate. In Uvalde, it is also about the frailty of human response, as the shooter’s grandmother had called police before he got to the school and 911 calls were coming from inside the school throughout the incident to no avail.
But research — controlled for things like poverty, race, age and other factors — has shown that the U.S. isn’t any more mentally ill than other developed countries, we don’t play more violent video games and we’re not more violence-prone. We also don’t have more violent crime than other developed nations, but our crime is more deadly because — you guessed it — we have more deadly weapons.
In other words, people in other countries get angry, have family squabbles, play “Call of Duty,” subscribe to racist propaganda, are lonely or suffer from mental instability. What makes life more lethal for a 10-year-old sitting at a U.S. kitchen table than it is for a 10-year-old in Sweden — which has one of the world’s highest rates of gun ownership — is that our country makes it super easy for just about anyone to get any kind of weapon, few questions asked and no education or training required.
Congress can’t do anything about absent fathers, legislate that parents teach their kids how to reach out to the loners in the lunchroom, or require every male between the ages of 30 and 65 to become a mentor at their local Boys and Girls Club.
They can, however, establish federal gun policy like every other developed nation has, some as recently as last week (Hi, Canada!), taking it a tiny step at a time. Raising the minimum age to purchase all guns to 21 and restricting the number of rounds a gun magazine can hold to six would be a good start, even though we also need permit-to-purchase programs, universal 10-day waiting periods, required gun safety classes and yes, banning high-velocity, high-capacity weapons such as the AR-15.
As the saying goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words. We need a sea change for lawmakers to have the political will to put children before their careers and the gun lobby, and to get there, we need the shock wave that comes with graphic reality. Show us the photos.
