Show America the photographs of kids decapitated in school massacres

Two children whose bodies had been pulverized by bullets fired at them decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped apart, that the only clue of their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes clinging to them, clinging for life and finding none.” —  Dr. Roy Guerrero

Over the weekend, CNN announced it showed the willing parents of the surviving children of the Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, TX massacre, videos of the terror their children experienced during and after the shootings. It is a good start. But it does not go far enough. Americans must witness the pictures of the kids slaughtered by homicidal malcontents.

Conservatives will resist.  

These mortiferous fantasists have little use for the truth. They want to sanitize our racist history and pretend LGBTQ does not exist. This willful abnegation is an abomination. Ignorance is not bliss. It perpetuates racism, homophobia, transphobia, and all the other isms/phobias made so ubiquitous because bigots, fanatics, and the deluded want to sweep reality under the rug.

For America to be great, we must stop lying to our children. And adults must face the reality of school shootings. Gun nuts cannot peddle their philosophy in a PG space. Gunshot victims rarely die with a tidy little entry wound and a bit of shmutz where the bullet exits — if it exits.

High-powered weapons pulverize flesh and blow off heads and limbs. The tumbling bullet lacerates arteries, organs, viscera, muscles, and brains. The victims do not go quietly to sleep. Bullets smash them to death, sometimes with the knowledge that they may soon die. Many Uvalde massacre victims lived in mortal terror, for what must have seemed an eternity before hollow-point ammunition exploded in their young bodies and tore them apart.

In testimony to Congress, Dr. Roy Guerrero, a local Uvalde pediatrician and a graduate of Robb Elementary, described what he saw at the hospital after the Uvalde school shootings.

“I had heard from some of the nurses there were two dead children who had been moved to the surgical area of the hospital. As I made my way there I prayed that I wouldn’t find her.

I didn’t find Alaina but I did find something no prayer will ever relieve. Two children whose bodies had been pulverized by bullets fired at them decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped apart, that the only clue of their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes clinging to them, clinging for life and finding none.”

These Congresspeople should have been forced to look at the pictures of dead children. It is time all Americans saw the images.

What are the arguments against it? If it is a question of sparing the parents’ feelings, then only release the pictures with parental permission. Some parents will say no. Others will want the death of their greatest love to count for something. They should at least be comforted that their act might save another child.

Is it that the pictures are too graphic? That is the point.

Gun massacre-enabling politicians will call these gruesome displays gratuitous politicization of death. Of course it is political. Everything is political. But the politics, in this case, are pro-life. And there is nothing gratuitous about it.

The word means “uncalled for; lacking good reason; unwarranted.” Is there anything more called for, reasonable, and warranted than preserving the life of a child?

The debate over guns is an exercise in abstraction. Seeing pictures of dead kids will ground the conversation in fact. Civilians celebrated war as a chivalric exercise in honor and patriotism — until Matthew Brady’s photographs of the battlefields of the Civil War brought home the carnage of conflict. TV images of the Vietnam War fueled the anti-war movement of the 1960s.

The time has come to be as honest about the effects of the war being fought in America by homicidal domestic terrorists, enabled by a profit-driven gun lobby, underpinned by a cynical propaganda campaign riling up the small fraction of Americans who cling to gun absolutism as a foundational virtue.

Thomas Jefferson may have written the unfortunate remark, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants,” — but he prefaced it by saying, “What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?”

America is losing over 44,000 of its citizens to gun violence every year. What would Jefferson have written if he were a witness to not a “few lives” but more lives lost each and every 26 months than the total dead in the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined?

I do not want to look at the picture of a decapitated child. But if it will save the life of another, I will. And every American who values life must do so as well. And we must do so until no more children die blood-soaked and mutilated in school shootings. And the total number of Americans dead by gunshot is in line with civilized countries.    

I do not know if you can shame a conservative politician — but we have to try.