I’m sure you’ve read and grown enraged about the attacks in Buffalo, NY, and in Uvalde, TX. In Buffalo, only a few weeks ago, a self-identified white supremacist shot up a grocery store in a Black neighborhood. Then, not long after, a gunman went on a rampage at an elementary school, killing 19 school kids and two of their teachers as well as injuring 17 others.
But did you hear anything about the other 229 mass shootings that have happened so far this year? Neither the Buffalo nor the Uvalde shootings were the latest to happen in the US—just yesterday, there were three separate public shootings in Philly, Charleston (South Carolina), and Benton Harbor (Michigan). It’s only been 21 weeks so far in 2022 yet there have already been 231 mass shootings in the US. Surely, none of these attacks are the same, but how can people ever be expected to properly mourn these deaths and all the trauma and harm caused, or even enact real change when there are more mass shootings in this country than days in a year? There isn’t even enough time between shootings to process and address each one.
Mass shooting. Outrage. Debate about laws. Rinse and repeat. This is the typical cycle the US goes through every time a highly-publicized mass shooting occurs in the United States. It’s a sad reality and there’s little to show for the cycle of violence that enrages the public yet carries on. And the latest debates over America’s gun laws are a doozy.
First, true to form, conservative lawmakers have called to actually arm school teachers and other personnel with their own guns. Stable geniuses like Texas AG Ken Paxton—who played a huge role in making the state’s criminalization of healthcare for trans youth a reality—and former Cheeto-in-Chief Donald Trump have both argued for giving teachers guns. Well, not only is that an insane idea but it’s already been tried in cowboy states like Texas and Florida, where there are laws that allow schools to deputize their staff with firearms on school grounds. In Florida, these armed school staff are unironically called “guardians.”
Understandably, the response from school teachers to this proposal has largely been “uuh, no thanks” and ultimately, there’s no evidence even suggesting that giving teachers guns—instead of say, the teaching equipment they’ve been begging for—actually makes students safer. But another crazy thing I’ve learned in the aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting is that, after every high-profile shooting, US gun laws tend to get laxer not tighter. And what is the use of adding more guns in a country where there are already more guns in the hands of civilians than there are actual people living here? Then we wonder why nothing’s changed!! If you want a more in-depth read on the renewed debate over arming teachers, here’s a write-up I did recently about it for Vox.
Another absurd debate that’s popped up in the aftermath of Uvalde specifically—and this really gets my blood boiling—is the ridiculous calls to promote the graphic destruction that the shooting left. In other words, some people think it would be a great idea to show images of the school children’s bodies from the shooting.
Then, to make the argument even worse, some of these people advocating for this idea have also defended their argument by invoking Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched to death in 1955.
I really cannot with this one. Just to be clear: Emmett Till’s mother was the one to decide that she wanted to have an open casket for her murdered son, to expose to the wider public what happened. It was her personal choice—she did not do it because people were demanding that she do it to push for “more than thoughts and prayers.” And although Till’s murder certainly helped galvanize the Black civil rights movement in the late 1950s, cases of lynching continued on until very recently with the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery, who was gunned down by vigilante white folks while he was out jogging. It wasn’t until this year—THIS YEAR!—that lynching was actually made a federal hate crime through the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. That is 67 years since Till’s murder.
These tweets are just a few examples from social media I’ve seen of people suggesting using the imagery of dead brown babies as some sort of catalyst for change. I am embarrassed that people who call themselves “journalists” are among those actively promoting this as a serious way to… do what exactly? This idea rubs me the wrong way especially because the school in Uvalde where the shooting happened is predominantly Latino. So, what these folks are really saying is they want to splash images of mutilated brown babies all over the news, and use that to push change on gun laws—even though there is zilch evidence that that kind of trauma porn campaign would do anything. Interestingly, I have not seen similar discourse around using the images of Ukrainian children killed in the war to stop Russia’s invasion or to increase international pressure (and just to be clear, I would not support that idea, either).
The debate around showing the slain children’s bodies is not surprising to me. The trauma of non-white children has always intrigued white folks—that’s why you see so many photographs of bone-thin Black babies in Africa suffering famine or pictures of brown kids living through wars in conflict zones. I think the most famous example of trauma imagery of non-white children used to push an agenda is the photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl who was photographed running naked after her village was bombed during the Vietnam war in 1972. Major US publications ran the photograph in their papers and the photo later won a Pulitzer.
While the image was photographed by a Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut who was working for the Associated Press at the time, the decision to run the photo was made by white editors, for their paper’s white audience. There was outrage and outpouring of emotion over the photo… and then the war went on for three more years.
I agree with the broad notion that images are powerful and can be used to influence the way people view things. But contrary to popular belief, in the last few decades, surveys have consistently shown that most Americans support tighter gun regulations. While how much tighter and what kind of laws they support is still up for debate, it’s obvious that swaying public opinion about better gun control laws is NOT the problem here. The main reason nothing changes is because there are legislators in Congress who are in the back pockets of the National Rifle Association, which remains one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country. It’s why Congress can never pass any meaningful gun control laws at the federal level, and with porous borders in-between states, limited local gun legislation becomes nearly meaningless in curbing gun violence.
As I was saying, publishing the photographs of dead brown children—whose bodies were mangled by the force of the assault weapon used by the school shooter at close range—would be something else entirely. Here is a description of the bodies from Uvalde’s only pediatrician, per a report from USA Today:
The deceased children Guerrero viewed were not the kids of the parents in the waiting room of the hospital, but what he saw will never leave his mind.
“It was awful,” he explained. “It was a high-power rifle injury. Almost decapitation, to that level. Open chest wounds. These are war wounds. It's as if things exploded once the bullets hit the bodies.” It wasn’t until two days later that the trauma from the day caught up with him.
“I lost it for a little while,” he said. “And that's OK, but I told myself to get it together. I have to take care of the rest of these kids. I can't lose myself.”
There is no guarantee that displaying these images—which goes against standard journalistic protocols in most newsrooms—would have any effect. As NYT’s Opinion columnist Margaret Renkl pointed out in a 2020 piece, lamenting the power—or lack of—that such photographs hold to push real policy change:
Last summer, Julia Le Duc photographed the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, facedown in the mud alongside the Rio Grande. The photo went viral on social media, a visceral reminder of the desperation of migrants seeking asylum in this country. And yet this country is no closer to a reasonable immigration policy now than it was when baby Valeria died with her tiny arm wrapped around her father’s neck. Nor are we any closer to a gun policy that protects schoolchildren or an economic policy that protects the working poor.
(Renkl’s piece ultimately argues that visceral trauma photos are still important to publish even though they don’t do much to push for policy change because they “move people” emotionally.) The bottom line is there are simply better ways to put pressure on lawmakers for real policies than waving images of dead kids in people’s faces. And, to be totally frank, the notion that the carnage left in the wake of these mass shootings would do anything… that ship sailed a long time ago when the Sandy Hook school shooting happened and US lawmakers did nothing.
Anyway, if you’re wondering about the title of this newsletter, below is the full version of the poem from Brian Bilston—known as the “Poet Laureate of Twitter”—whose famous poem title I took for this week’s newsletter. I’m very particular about the kind of poetry that grabs me and this one, though simple, has been stuck in my head for a while.
What are your thoughts on the gun debate in the US? How do you feel about guns? Are you totally put off by them like I am? Sound off in the comments or reply to this email!
SOME THINGS I WROTE ABOUT
If you’re a subscriber to the newsletter, you already know this but I’ve been working a ton which is also why I’ve been away from the newsletter for the last few months (so sorry!!). In case you’d like to know what I’ve been up to, here are some of the articles that I’ve written recently:
🖊️ How would $10,000 in student loan debt forgiveness impact student debtors of color?
🖊️ Overtly white supremacist ideology is being sanitized and mainstreamed
🖊️ The Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act, explained
🖊️ Stronger public health systems and uniform messaging are critical to fight Covid-19
If you enjoy my reporting or this newsletter and would like to support my work, you can donate a tip here 🍵💖
TWEET OF THE WEEK: ON ASKING BLACK WOMEN FOR TOO MUCH (AGAIN) 🤡
(The tweet is referring to people asking Quinta Brunson, the creator of the comedy series Abbott Elementary, to do an episode about… a school shooting. Y’all embarrassing.)
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SOME THINGS TO CHECK OUT
🔥 Can’t keep up with the GOP’s war on abortion? Here’s a super helpful interactive color-coded map and explainer of anti-abortion laws broken down by state. | The 19th
🔥 Supreme Court clerks may be required to hand over their phone records as the court’s marshal investigates the leaked SCOTUS draft opinion on the constitutional right to abortion in the US. | Insider
🔥 K-pop superstar group BTS—who were last year appointed as special envoys to the UN—made headlines following their appearance at the White House where they were invited as part of the government’s campaign against anti-Asian racism. | USA Today
🔥 The European Union just released its sixth round of sanctions against Russia to deter its invasion of Ukraine, including a partial ban on Russian oil imports across Europe. | CNN
🔥 In a small act of bare-minimum decency, Pfizer just launched an initiative to offer all its manufactured drugs not-for-profit to 45 lower-income countries. | Guardian
🔥 What does America’s right-wing push for anti-democratic and white supremacist policies have to do with the prime minister of Hungary? Listen here. | Vox
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Arrivederci,
Natasha