Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

Daily Comment

Would Showing Graphic Images of

Mass Shootings Spur Action to Stop
Them?
Returning to an old debate after the horrific killings in Uvalde, Texas.

On an evening seven years ago this month, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist

named Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel A.M.E. Church on Calhoun Street, in
Charleston, South Carolina, pulled a semi-automatic handgun, and murdered nine
Black congregants, in the midst of their Bible study. When he was arrested, the
following day, he confessed to the murders, citing a convoluted theory of defending
white sovereignty as his rationale. In the years since, his reasoning has become no
less opaque, even as similar thinking has become more commonly articulated. But, as
if to demonstrate the clear horror of its impact, the prosecution in Roof’s trial, in
December, 2016, exhibited images from the crime scene. The tableaux of death
brought gasps and quiet sobs from those in attendance, some of whom were survivors
of the attack, others relatives of the victims.

The root of their pain lay in the photographs’ gruesome specificity and its capacity to
answer in precise detail questions that were too lurid to have occurred otherwise:
how the bodies lay; how the dead faces were contorted; how the spatters of blood
patterned the walls. Many in the courtroom, journalists and family members alike,
averted their eyes. It seemed that the cumulative detail of those images could tell
them little that they did not already know: nine people were dead for no other reason
than the color of their skin.

That moment returns to mind in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting, in which
yet another group of innocents was slain for arbitrary, inscrutable reasons. The deaths
of nineteen children and two adults at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde,
Texas—just days after the shooting deaths of ten adults at a Tops supermarket in
Buffalo—have provoked new waves of frustration and despair, and new demands for
change. The sheer redundancy of these needless tragedies has people searching for
any dynamic that might finally effect a meaningful response to them. David
Boardman, the dean of Temple University’s Klein College of Media and
Communication, wrote, on Twitter, “Couldn’t have imagined saying this years ago,
but it’s time—with the permission of a surviving parent—to show what a slaughtered
7-year-old looks like. Maybe only then will we find the courage for more than
thoughts and prayers.”

In the past week, others have begun to consider the idea. The Times ran an
exploration of the politics of graphic images and their power to shape public opinion,
and CNN’s Brian Stelter took up the issue on his show. Many people, having
repeatedly grieved children murdered by semi-automatic weaponry, have come to
suspect that only showing what an AR-15-style rifle actually does to a child’s body
will shock gun-reform opponents out of inaction. But, while this thinking is
understandable, it is probably misguided, and potentially self-defeating. Showing
such images could cause the sympathetic public to avoid media coverage of these
incidents; for those who do look, it might risk inuring them to the terrible nature of
gun violence. The most commonly cited example in defense of the practice is Mamie
Till’s decision, in 1955, to let Jet magazine publish photographs taken of her lynched
fourteen-year-old son, Emmett Till, as he lay in an open casket. No one who has seen
the grisly abstraction of his face has difficulty recalling it.

Mamie Till reportedly told John H. Johnson, Jet’s publisher, that she wanted to show
the world what had been done to her son. Her audacious decision not only morally
indicted the men responsible for Till’s death—that year, none were found guilty by a
court—but galvanized public opinion against segregation and Jim Crow. Yet it is
important to recall that Till was far from the first lynching victim to be photographed,
and the overwhelming majority of those images, some of them even more graphic
and sickening, had no discernible effect upon public opinion, and may even have
reinforced the crude propensities of those who saw and circulated them. (Many of the
photographs survive because people turned them into postcards.)

“Without Sanctuary,” an exhibit of lynching photographs that first opened at a New

York City gallery, in 2000, was a window into the abject cruelty of the era, yet the
horrors depicted in the images weren’t nearly as striking as the exuberance of the
murderers and the onlookers. The historian Amy Louise Wood, in her book
“Lynching and Spectacle,” notes that, although we view the pictures as evidence of
monstrous cruelty, at the time they were taken they were likely seen as part of a
different genre: the hunting photo. In them, men proudly pose near charred and
desecrated Black bodies as if they were grasping the antlers of a fallen buck. Most of
the imagery associated with lynching had the opposite effect of the Till
photograph—serving to further distance the viewer from the victims, rather than
humanize them.

Tabloid journalism is often stigmatized for pandering to the basest human

inclinations—titillation, cheap horror, rage—but the fact is that no publisher can
control how an image will be consumed, no matter how sombre or austere the
presentation. Susan Sontag, in “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a book on the politics
of war photography, writes that images of atrocities do not convey a single,
uncontested message; rather, their meaning depends heavily on their context. A
photograph of a slain civilian that evokes sympathy and outrage in viewers on one
side of a conflict may engender satisfaction on the other. Dylann Roof, during his
trial, sat mannequin-still, his face a mask (though it was reported that he had marked
his sneakers with white-supremacist symbols). His stoic demeanor became even
more noteworthy during the display of the crime-scene images. The tacit hope is that
such a confrontation will force a murderer to realize the evil of his actions—and
perhaps to show contrition for them. But Roof didn’t flinch, didn’t glance away,
suggesting another possibility: that he could just as easily have viewed the
photographs as a testament to his success.

We have to consider all such possible responses, because the latest suggestions that
we publish graphic images of mass shootings come from empathetic individuals who
want to shock the public into greater empathy, and from there to action. But the
violence itself is the product of the opposite sensibility—a profound absence of
empathy. The reason that the Emmett Till photo was received differently than other
similar images was because of the context in which it was shown. Unlike earlier
lynching photographs, Till’s picture was taken by people sympathetic to him, not to
his killers. And it was shown to Northern audiences who were both unfamiliar with
the peculiar nature of this brutality and disgusted by their introduction to it. In this
regard, there is a direct connection between the Till photo and others that have stirred
national or international outrage. The 1972 image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, known as
the “napalm girl,” collapsed the distance between the front lines of the Vietnam War
and the home front in the United States. The images that emerged from concentration
camps at the end of the Second World War horrified a global audience that, despite
six years of conflict, was now introduced, through the lens of a camera, to a new tier
of human depravity. A photograph taken by the Mathew Brady Studio of a man
known as Peter, who escaped from slavery, and whose back was a lattice of scars
from the lash, became an enormously influential indictment of that institution during
the Civil War.

Those images exposed sheltered segments of the public to cruelties that they were
either previously unaware of or which had been subject to dispute. The photographs
of Peter, the camps, and Till, in particular, served to dispel official denials that such
brutality had ever existed. Similarly, the video of George Floyd’s murder, in 2020, so
convulsed the country in part because it captured the extraordinary duration and the
slow, deliberate nature of the act, and thus helped settle a debate about whether
police killings of African Americans were solely the regrettable result of the
split-second decisions that law enforcement is required to make, or whether an
element of actual malice is ever involved. (Notably, though, no other police killings
captured on video—of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Philando Castile—inspired such
widespread outrage.)

All the responses to these images were so heavily dependent upon context that
focussing on their graphic nature is almost beside the point. But releasing images of
those who died in Robb Elementary School would not reveal anything more to us
than the photos of the Emanuel A.M.E. victims revealed in the Charleston courtroom.
We know the nature of the problem; in fact, we cannot escape that knowledge, no
matter how much we might want to. Imposing on the public the knowledge of what
dead children look like would certainly generate secondary trauma, but history
suggests that it 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. At a time when the
media is increasingly reticent about repeatedly publishing the names of murderers
and the screeds that they pen, publishing the images of their actions would be a step
backward. We are unlikely to change the terms of the debate, but very likely to offer
those who author such acts a solo exhibition mounted before those most intimately
acquainted with the victims, allowing the murderers to inflict harm not simply
through their debased actions but by the very evidence those actions leave behind.
The Atrocity of American Gun Culture
After mass shootings like those in Uvalde and Buffalo, pro-gun officials say they
don’t want to politicize tragedy. But the circumstances that allow for the mass
murder of children are inherently political.

May, a month we traditionally associate with spring,

Mother’s Day, and graduations, was defined this year by a
far different rite: funerals. In a single ten-day stretch,
forty-four people were murdered in mass shootings
throughout the country—a carnival of violence that
confirmed, among other things, the political cowardice of a
large portion of our elected leadership, the thin pretense of
our moral credibility, and the sham of public displays of
sympathy that translate into no actual changes in our laws, our culture, or our
murderous propensities. In the two deadliest of these incidents, the oldest victim was
an eighty-six-year-old grandmother, who was shot in a Tops supermarket in Buffalo,
New York; the youngest were nine-year-old fourth-grade students, who died in
connected classrooms at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas.

In the interim, there were other mass shootings, in Indiana, Washington State,
Florida, California, Louisiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and elsewhere.
Less than one per cent of gun deaths in the United States are the result of mass
shootings. But the data are less salient than another element of the month’s tragedies:
the images posted of the children who died, many of them smiling, blithely unaware
of the flawed world they were born into. The knowledge that they are no longer
alive—that any future iterations of those smiles have been permanently
forestalled—is an indictment that we all have to live with.

Some of the victims of the shootings were killed evidently because they were Black;
others were killed for reasons that are as yet indiscernible. The shootings in Buffalo
and Uvalde, though, bore notable similarities. Both were carried out by
eighteen-year-olds who had legally purchased semi-automatic rifles shortly before
their killing sprees. Both shooters began their attacks before entering the respective
buildings. (The assailant in Uvalde shot and critically wounded his grandmother
before going to the school.) And both shooters were confronted by armed defenders
who failed to stop them. In Buffalo, Aaron Wallace Salter, Jr., a fifty-five-year-old
retired police officer who worked security at the supermarket, was killed after firing
multiple rounds and striking the shooter’s body armor. The Buffalo police
commissioner, Joseph Gramaglia, noting that Salter’s engagement with the gunman
gave people time to hide, said, “He undoubtedly saved lives.” Reports that an officer
had confronted the Uvalde gunman outside the school were subsequently refuted,
though the shooter apparently exchanged gunfire with multiple officers early on in
his rampage. (There was initial confusion and a delay, during which a large number
of law-enforcement agents arrived at the school; some of them restrained parents
who wanted to storm the building themselves. On Friday, a Texas state official said
that a “wrong decision” had caused the delay.)
These facts are significant. Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the horror in Newtown,
Connecticut—where a twenty-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle entered Sandy
Hook Elementary School and fatally shot twenty children and six adults—Wayne
LaPierre, the C.E.O. of the National Rifle Association, said, “The only thing that
stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The idea of vigilant protectors
subduing armed antagonists spoke to a vision of a society in which firearms are as
commonplace as cell phones, and where more guns mean more safety. If the idea
seemed absurd then, the passage of time has only made it empirically so.

Two years ago, a study published in the journal Justice Quarterly examined the
effects of gun laws in every state. Emma Fridel, an assistant professor of criminology
at Florida State University, looked at gun-ownership rates and the proliferation of
concealed-carry laws between 1991 and 2016. State lawmakers pushing for laxer
laws have tended to argue that a more broadly armed public would serve as a
deterrent to violence. Fridel found the opposite: gun-homicide rates in states with
more permissive carry policies were eleven per cent higher than in states with stricter
laws, and the probability of mass shootings increased by roughly fifty-three per cent
in states with more gun ownership.

The most obvious indicator of the absurdist thinking on this subject can be seen in
the fact that the latest massacre happened in Texas, a state that has more than eight
thousand gun dealers, and where an estimated thirty-seven per cent of the population
owns firearms. Last year, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that allowed most
Texans to carry handguns without a license or mandatory training. This legislation
did not prevent the Uvalde carnage any more than previous legislation allowing
easier access to guns prevented the 2019 shooting that killed twenty-three people at
an El Paso Walmart, or the 2017 attack in the town of Sutherland Springs, which took
the lives of twenty-six worshippers in a rural church.

All this was the context when Beto O’Rourke confronted Abbott during a press
conference in Uvalde last Wednesday. “The time to stop the next shooting is right
now, and you are doing nothing,” he said, adding, “This is on you.” O’Rourke, the
former Democratic congressman and Presidential candidate, whose angry pledge to
take away guns after the killings in El Paso was widely thought to have damaged his
political prospects, is running for governor against Abbott this year. That likely
explains, in part, why Don McLaughlin, the Republican mayor of Uvalde, who has
appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, called O’Rourke a “sick son of a bitch” and
accused him of making the shooting “a political issue.” Senator Ted Cruz, who was
also at the press conference, later said, “I get tired of all the politicking. It happens
every time there is a mass shooting.” That Cruz used the phrase “every time there is a
mass shooting” spoke volumes about how commonplace these abominations have
become. Two days later, Cruz addressed the annual N.R.A. convention, in Houston.

O’Rourke did not politicize the shooting. The circumstances that make a mass
murder of fourth graders possible are inherently political. The legal access to the
weaponry involved is political. The most visible people refusing to see these things
as political happen to be elected to political office. But O’Rourke was only partially
right. Some of this is on Second Amendment fundamentalists and the politicians who
translate their zealotry into law—the rest is on every one of us who has yet to find the
courage, the creativity, or the resolve to stop it. ♦