After his son died at Sandy Hook, the father contemplated showing the world the damage a rifle can do.
His first thought was that it would move some people.
His second was not my kid.
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There is a debate over whether to show graphic images of the results of gun violence in order to bring about change.
From the abolition movement to Black Lives Matter, from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War, photographs and film have laid bare the human toll of racism, authoritarianism and ruinous foreign policy. Sometimes they lead to change. The potential use of these images to end official inertia after mass shootings presents new, wrenching considerations for victims and their families.
The executive director of Columbia University's Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma said that shocking photos of suffering occasionally do make an impression.
When you're a photo editor, you don't know which photograph is exploitative and which image will move the needle on the debate.
A photograph of a mother, two children and a family friend killed in Irpin, Ukranian, is one of the disturbing images shown by mainstream news organizations. They don't show human gore.
We try to balance the news value of an image and its service to our readers against whether or not the image is dignified for the victims or their families.
In the case of the Uvalde shooting, law enforcement did not release any images from the crime scene and photojournalists were not allowed on the grounds of the school. The images made by Pete Luna from the Uvalde Leader News were the only ones that the press photographers were able to capture. The decision about whether to publish graphic images from the shooting is not important because media outlets had no access to the images.
Noah was one of the first children to be buried after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Noah hid in the classroom bathroom with 15 classmates, where the shooter fired more than 80 rounds from a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, killing all but one child.
Noah's back, arm, hand and face were destroyed by bullets. Veronique De LaRosa, Noah's mother, held a private, open-coffin viewing before his funeral service, which was attended by Connecticut's governor at the time. De LaRosa took him by the hand to see her son, who was lying in a coffin at the back of the funeral home.
I'm going to pass out. She will show me open wounds and I will not be able to handle it very well.
The damage to Noah's mouth was hidden by a square of white fabric. She said that he was still looking at a dead child.
Connecticut passed some of the strictest gun safety measures in the nation after Sandy Hook.
Michael Moore proposed the release of crime scene photos by the Sandy Hook victims' relatives as a way to spur political action, but there was a different outcome around the same time. The Sandy Hook families thought that Moore had written and directed a 2002 documentary about the Colorado high school shooting that was intended to seek photos of their children. They worked with the Connecticut government to prevent access to materials related to the victims. Sandy Hook victims' photos are only accessible to their families.
Emily Bernard is an author and professor of English at the University of Vermont.
People who have access to those photos have to ask themselves, who benefits? Is this going to help us or is it just terrible?
Bernard talked about a Civil War-era photograph of a formerly enslaved man in a 2020 seminar at Columbia University's Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. She said that the image of the shirtless man, his back severely scarred from beatings, was essential to the development of the campaign against slavery.
In 1955, a Jet magazine photographer, David Jackson, was invited to photograph the brutalized body of her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, who had been savagely beaten, shot and dumped into the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi by two white men. The civil rights movement was sparked by the images of the open coffin at the funeral of Till.
In 2020, the cellphone video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd sparked global fury and some of the largest protests in American history. It kindled a debate over the ubiquity of images of violence against Black people and the relatively few images of white victims.
For all the political utility of these videos and images, for all of their motivational usefulness, I'm not sure that it's ethical.
We don't see white Americans displayed in the same way for horrible crimes. We will see white people abroad. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a firefighter, Chris Fields, cradling a fatally wounded infant after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing is an exception.
Some journalists, academics and survivors have proposed releasing photos of the scenes of violence instead of the victims, as a potentially powerful but less intrusive approach. The images of the school's bloody classrooms were released by wire services after the Taliban attacked the school.
I can imagine some pictures that could be made without dehumanizing the victims that speak to the story of the AR-15, which is a story that has not been seen or fully told.
This weapon is designed to destroy humans and it's purpose is to obliterate them. There is a political discussion about why we are using an assault rifle. Why do our legislators think this is something the Constitution considered?
American journalists don't have access to try and make these pictures.
Berman said that a culture so steeped in violence spends a lot of time preventing anyone from actually seeing it.
After his son's death, Pozner devoted his life to battling conspiracy theorists who spread false claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a government hoax, intended to promote efforts at gun control. He doesn't think releasing Noah's photo would have changed much.
He said that everything would get amplified.
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