Time to act

And now we have another mass school shooting, this time in Tennessee with three 9-year-old girls dead as well as 3 adults. Immediately followed by another pathetic Republican congressman claiming that Congress can’t do a thing.

A community is grieving, schoolkids across America are terrified, and after 130 mass shootings in the first 87 days of this year – 33 of them in schools and colleges – you’d think average Americans would finally understand the horrors of the gun violence Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court have inflicted on us. This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s. The gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement. Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.

Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any consequence.)

His mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinarily brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown of Chicago. Jet magazine ran a picture you can see here of Emmett, which went viral, invigorating the Civil Rights movement as it horrified the nation. As President Biden said last month, honoring the release of the new movie Till:

“JET magazine, the Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers were unflinching and brave in sharing the story of Emmett Till and searing it into the nation’s consciousness.” That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it. We’ve all heard about Newtown and Stoneman Douglas and Las Vegas, but have you ever seen pictures of the bodies mutilated by the .223 caliber bullets that semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR15 fire?

The odds are pretty close to zero; most Americans have no idea the kind of damage such weapons of war can do to people, particularly children. But we need to learn.

In the 1980s, egged on by partisans in the Reagan administration, America’s antiabortion movement begin the practice of holding up graphic, bloody pictures of aborted fetuses as part of their demonstrations and vigils. Their literature and magazines, and even some of their advertisements, often carry or allude to these graphic images.

Those in the movement will tell you that the decision to use these kinds of pictures was a turning point, when “abortion became real“ for many Americans, and even advocates of a woman’s right to choose an abortion started using phrases like “legal, safe, and rare.“

Similarly, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 9-year-old ‘Napalm Girl’ Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked down a rural Vietnamese road after napalm caught her clothes on fire was published in 1972, it helped finally turned the tide on the Vietnam War. Showing pictures in American media of the result of a mass shooter’s slaughter would be a controversial challenge.

There are legitimate concerns about sensationalizing violence, about morbid curiosity, about warping young minds and triggering PTSD for survivors of violence.

Excerpted: ‘It Is Time to Show the American People Photographs of Children Massacred by Gun Violence’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org