Mass shootings: Should there be photos?

After his 6-year-old son was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Lenny Pozner wondered if images of the horrific damage an assault rifle did to his child might change minds about gun laws. “It would move some people,” he thought—followed by “Not my kid.” After another school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, left the nation embroiled in another debate over gun violence, said Elizabeth Williamson in The New York Times, some advocates of gun restrictions are asking: Would images of child victims “jolt the nation’s gridlocked leadership into action?” Throughout history, shocking photos have served to sway public opinion and create political pressure for major change. In 1955, published photos of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s mutilated face helped launch the civil rights movement. In 1972, a photo of a naked “napalm girl” helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War. The endless accounts of school shootings have left Americans numbed, said Timothy O’Brien in The Washington Post, and “horror may spur people to action more directly than sympathy.”

Do we really need “a grisly photo of a child blown to pieces by a high-velocity assault rifle to spur people into action?” asked Marcela García in The Boston Globe. For every example of a shocking photo that led to major change, there are dozens of others that changed nothing. Consider the wrenching 2019 photo of the bodies of a father and his 2-year-old daughter who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande River into the

U.S. It had zero impact on immigration policy. In the case of school shootings, said Kara Voght in Rolling Stone, “weaponizing” gruesome photos would re-traumatize parents already copying with overwhelming grief. Nelba Márquez-Greene, the mother of a Sandy Hook victim, recently said of renewed calls to allow publication of her daughter’s autopsy photo: “I don’t think people truly understand the consequences of an ask like that for a family.”

Such photos would be unlikely to alter the gun debate anyway, said Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker. Till’s photo, and the video of George Floyd’s murder by police, “served to dispel official denials that such brutality had ever existed.” Americans already know children are being massacred by gunmen. Photos of their mutilated bodies “would not change the minds of the men and women who have already accepted their deaths as the price of a warped vision of freedom.”