IF I'M KILLED AND DISFIGURED BY AN AR-15, PLEASE SHOW THE IMAGES

There was a mass shooting at a Texas mall on Saturday. What witnesses saw was horrible:

In an interview on Sunday, [Steven] Spainhauer, a former police officer, said he went to the scene of the shooting at the outlet mall in Allen after getting a call from his son.

"I found seven people shot in front of the store," he said.

Spainhauer recalled the horrific details of three victims, noting that one girl "had no face."

On Twitter, users have been posting a video clip of a pile of bodies at the mall. Twitter has removed the clip repeatedly, but it keeps returning; it's here now, at least for the moment. (The tweeter incorrectly refers to the massacre as a school shooting.) There's a pixilated version here.

Most decent people think Twitter should be censoring the video more rigorously.

I didn’t truly realize how bad Twitter has gotten until I accidentally stumbled across one of the videos from the most recent mall shooting and saw it had been up for OVER EIGHT HOURS? That shit would’ve been taken down within ten minutes before they fired the entire mod team.

— addy kaye (@adellephox) May 8, 2023

I disagree with the outrage. It's so much easier for the thoughts-and-prayers brigade to tell Americans that our massacres are merely regrettable rather than conscience-shocking when we don't see the reality of these shootings -- the literally visceral reality. In the video clip, you see a child's brain matter on the pavement. You get a sense of what assault weapons do to bodies. This needs to be seen by every American who can bear to look -- and by every Republican politician.

I live in New York City. We have crime, but it's usually not this kind of crime. Nevertheless, I've told my wife that if I'm killed and disfigured in this way, I want the images to go public. I think we should all make this pledge. We need to reject the taboo against showing these images. Too many people have an image of gun death derived from television and Hollywood. It's quick. It's clinical. It's only moderately bloody. That helps the Republicans maintain their stranglehold on gun policy in Washington and in much of the country.

A few months ago, after video showing the police murder of Tyre Nichols was released, I noticed that even some right-leaning news outlets felt compelled to acknowledge that the cops had gone too far -- because we saw that they did. I wrote:

... the right-wing media is ... generally describing the police violence as extreme and unjustified. A headline at the Daily Mail: "Tennessee sheriff suspends two deputies and orders new investigation after officers are seen FIST-BUMPING in sickening bodycam as Tyre Nichols lies on the ground in agony." At Fox News: "Reaction swift after Tyre Nichols police footage released; 'These men were street fighting,' former cop says."

We'll retreat to our corners soon enough, but the fact that some on the right acknowledge basic facts about these attacks suggests that there's some benefit in allowing the public to see the nature of the violence we argue about ideologically. The visual facts of these cases do not have a right-wing bias.

It was good that we saw that footage, and if rage monsters are going to keep destroying innocent bodies, it would be good to see those bodies, as Emmett Till's mother understood after racial terrorists killed her child:

When Mamie Till held an open-casket funeral for her murdered and disfigured son, Emmett, then allowed photos of his body to be published in Jet magazine, she did the right thing. I wonder whether we now need to see graphic images of mass shootings, or even ordinary firearm murders or suicides. There's widespread agreement in our culture that these images are taboo, but technology, from television to TikTok, has made us visual rather than verbal -- we may never grasp the horror of gun violence without seeing that horror unexpurgated. I think someday there'll be a gun-violence Mamie Till. That person will be vilified, but we'll realize after a while that we needed to see what was exposed.

We've known since the time of Rodney King that many of us don't understand brutality even when we see it. But some of us can grasp the truth when it's presented that way. So we need the images.

If I'm killed this way, I want the carnage to be seen. We might start the slow work of reversing America's gun absolutism if more people defy this taboo.