Disturbing images of victims of Saturday’s mall shooting in Texas that circulated on Twitter have prompted fresh debate about whether showing effects of gun violence would alter the gridlocked political dynamic on the issue.
As a warning to readers, this column will contain graphic descriptions of Saturday’s massacre.
During a town hall Monday night in Bronzeville, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson compared showing graphic images of gun violence to Mamie Till’s insistence on an open casket to show the brutal murder of her son, Emmett Till, in 1955, and how that changed the trajectory of the civil rights movement.
“There’s going to come a time when we’re going to have somebody else as courageous as Mamie Till and show people the horror of what too many mothers are going through,” Jackson said. “She said, ‘I want the world to see this,’ and maybe through this act of courage she could shock the nation, and she certainly did.”
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It would take a lot to shock a nation deeply divided along partisan lines and numbed by frequent news of mass shootings and daily tolls of deaths from gun violence. But images of Saturday’s massacre hinted at the horrors being hidden from the sight of most Americans.
Abstract debate about Second Amendment freedoms or banning assault weapons can fail to capture the carnage of how bullets fired from AK-17s obliterate human bodies, particularly those of small children.
Steven Spainhouer told CBS News how he arrived at the scene of Saturday’s mall shooting in Allen, Texas, before any other first responders.
“The first girl I walked up to was crouched down covering her head in the bushes, so I felt for a pulse, pulled her head to the side and she had no face,” Spainhouer said.
Spainhouer also rescued a child who apparently survived because the boy’s mother sacrificed her life to shield him from bullets.
“When I rolled the mother over, he came out,” Spainhouer said. “I asked him if he was OK and he said, ‘My mom is hurt, my mom is hurt.’ So rather than traumatize him, I pulled him around the corner sat him down and he was covered from head to toe … like somebody poured blood on him.”
Pictures and videos that circulated widely on Twitter showed a pile of bloodied bodies and what appeared to be a child’s brain matter splattered on a sidewalk.
Many critics directed their anger over the images at Elon Musk for gutting Twitter’s content moderation team in a cost-cutting move after he acquired the platform in October.
“This family does not deserve to see the dead relatives spread across Twitter for everybody to see,” veteran journalist Pat Holloway told The New York Times.
A gunman killed seven and wounded seven others before he was killed by a police officer who was nearby on an unrelated call and heard gunfire. Victims included a South Korean couple and one of their two young children. Their 5-year-old son survived.
Consideration of loved ones is certainly one aspect of the debate over graphic images. Society teaches us to respect life and revere the dead. Any attempt to exploit the gore of gun violence for ratings or profit would reflect the worst of human nature.
On the other hand, there have been moments in history, such as Emmett Till’s funeral and televised images of the Vietnam War, when displays of graphic images of violence moved the needle of public opinion on a volatile issue. One such issue was abortion.
For 50 years, members of the Pro-Life Action League have held posters in public showing aborted fetuses. They have stood along busy routes every summer for years and prompted complaints from motorists. I have covered the group’s annual protests for many years while working for newspapers in Naperville, Joliet and now the south and southwest suburbs.
I asked Eric Sheidler, executive director of the group founded by his late father, Joseph Scheidler, his thoughts about public showings of graphic images of gun violence. Images have more power to move people than words alone, Scheidler said Wednesday.
“I encountered a host of extremely disturbing images from Ukraine at some point last year,” Scheidler said. “Bloodied victims on the ground, where the Russians had pulled out and left behind devastation.”
Scheidler said he reacted to the images with anger.
“It’s very visceral, it comes from deep down inside, a sense of anger and revulsion, he said. “I’m angry that someone is showing me the pictures. That’s important for me to know, because I’m out there showing pictures of aborted babies.”
Scheidler said he has given the topic a lot of thought.
“When we’re confronted with graphic images of violence we’re desperate to find some way to push it away, put it in a box, get it out of our minds, out of our faces,” he said. “I think there’s a positive and a negative side to it.”
Some viewers of abortion images have directed anger at group members, Scheidler said.
“It can be very eye opening and alert people to the injustice being done, and you hope they will focus on the cause of the violence as opposed to the cause of them seeing the violence,” he said. “The person who is showing it to them shouldn’t be the one they’re angry at, but rather those who are responsible for the violence.”
But who is responsible for failure to address gun violence? Polls show the vast majority of Americans want more restrictions on guns. Perhaps it’s not the public that needs to see graphic images of gun violence, maybe it’s just the politicians.
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Some red states passed laws requiring women to watch videos or review materials before obtaining an abortion. Maybe blue states should pass laws requiring prospective buyers of assault weapons to view graphic images of gun violence before completing their purchases.
I think most would agree American newspapers, TV stations and social media sites should refrain from distributing graphic images showing the effects of gun violence. I also believe the images potentially have the power to shake us from our collective inability to address America’s insane fixation with guns.
Graphic images of gun violence are truthful. Maybe they should be displayed in a museum-like setting, similar to educational experiences that teach people about the horrors of the Holocaust. We shouldn’t deny the reality of gun violence, nor the trauma experienced by those who witness its effects firsthand.
“At the end of the day it’s very difficult to get those images out of your mind,” Scheidler said. “It’s easy to forget about a statistical chart about the presence of guns in a community or the numbers of women who regret abortions, or whatever it might be. Those things are easily forgotten.”
“But the images of abortion, gun violence, war, Emmett Till, who was so brutally murdered, those stay with you no matter how you think about the people who forced you to see it,” he said.
Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown.