Why They Should Show Photos Of Mass Shooting Victims -- Including Kids
Yet another mass killing happened yesterday in Cleveland, Texas, when Francisco Oropeza, age 39, took his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle and killed five people, including an 8-year-old child, after parents had complained Oropeza was keeping their baby awake at 11 p.m. shooting his rifle in his front yard. There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, and this is the 19th shooting that killed more than four people, not including the shooter.
The Washington Post reported that three children survived the shooting. “Two of the women who were killed were found lying on top of the young children in a bedroom. ‘They were trying to protect the children,’” San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers told the Post. “It’s horrific,” Capers said. “No one should ever have to look at this scene, the blood, the trauma that went on in that house.”
Yes, they should have to look at the horror. If color photographs of this mass killing and others were regularly printed in newspapers, and the crime scenes were shown on the television news, maybe the gun owners who love their AR-15’s so much would have to explain to their families and friends why owning a weapon of war that causes such human suffering and death is so important to them.
Photographs of dead bodies brought down by the savagery of an AR-15 fired point blank at victims would also give state legislators and members of Congress in Washington, D.C., the evidence they haven’t had to show the insanity of these terrible weapons.
I’d like to see Marjorie Taylor Greene, who shot at wild pigs from a helicopter for a campaign ad last year, defend her ownership of the AR-15 she used when a blow-up of a photograph of the dead bodies in Cleveland, TX, is shown on the floor of the House of Representatives.
“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” is the motto of the gun rights movement. Let’s see them say that when confronted with photographs of the dead women shot with an AR-15 who were found lying on top of children to protect them from that deadly weapon.
Show the crime scene photographs of mass shootings. Every police department takes photos to use as evidence of the crime. They should allow the same crime scene photographs to be used as evidence of the death and destruction caused by the AR-15 and other privately owned firearms.
We must face this blood and madness to stop it.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
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