Editors: Publish School Shooting Photos

It's been 25 years since Columbine. Nothing has changed and the crisis is worsening. You alone can change the conversation.

Dear America’s News Editors, 

My appeal is simple: after every major school shooting, please publish graphic photos of the victim’s bodies. 

The main justification is equally simple: showing Americans unvarnished images of what actually happens when an individual walks into a school with a high-powered weapon and murders children is the only chance we have at this point to end what is this country’s preeminent shame and its most enduring crisis for the last generation. 

Refrain from running those photos you always run after a school shooting. The maudlin shots of students weeping in each other’s arms. The conga lines of children marching to safety. Those banal tableaus of schools surrounded by yellow tape and police vehicles. 

If a 10th grade boy has been shot in the chest with an AR-15, you should run the photo. 

I am aware how repugnant this idea is. I am aware that no one wants to see these images. I am aware that these photos would traumatize many people, most certainly the school community, to say nothing of the victim’s friends and family. I am also aware that publishing photographs of this nature seriously challenges the ethics and decorum of your news organizations.

(I am also aware, as no doubt you are in the wake of this weekend’s mass shooting in Texas, that if you do not publish these types of photos, some will likely find their way into the sewer system of social media where there is a greater likelihood that they will be used for malicious, lurid ends.)

But before you dismiss this idea for the above reasons (and for the reasons you have given in the past), allow me to remind you in the simplest terms what the basic facts are around school shootings in this country as it stands today: 

1. Barring a miracle, school shootings will continue indefinitely. And when you consider that 40% of the 377¹ 380 school shootings that have happened since Columbine have occurred since 2018, the yearly rate is likely to continue to rapidly increase. There were 11 school shootings in 2012. In 2022, there were 46. There have been 18 this year already.

2. There has been little to no progress to prevent school shootings since Columbine. If there had been, we would see fewer shootings, not more.

3. As long as we have one political party that absolutely refuses to compromise in any way on even the most no-brainer gun control measures, there will be no political solution to the problem. None. 

4. There is nothing the average American can do to end school shootings. The problem is super resistant to those regular levers of civic action — marching, petitioning, voting, social media-ing — in a way no other American problem is. 

5. Americans have become indifferent or numb. The frequency of school shootings plays a large role here, but your method of covering school shootings has become formulaic, which in turn produces within news consumers the same cycle of emotions after every shooting: shock, grief, anger, and soon thereafter, detachment. And many people simply see the large type headlines and go straight to detachment.  

Thus, since there are no other solutions, nothing anyone else can do, and you and you alone have the means to publish these photos in an ethical manner, you, news editors, are obligated to obtain crime scene photos of the victims of school shootings — especially children — and publish them for the public to see. 

This is a prisoner’s dilemma, no doubt, but whatever we lose or risk by the publication of these photos is far preferable to the alternative, which is permitting another 25 years of child murder. 

And after all, you have made this decision before:

In 1955 you published a photo of the mutilated face of Emmett Till as he lay in his casket in Chicago. 

In 1968 you published a photo of the public execution as it happened of Nguyen Van Lem in Vietnam.

In 1972 you published a photo of a naked and screaming 9-year-old Kim Phuc Phan Thi — known as “Napalm Girl” — as she fled a napalm attack in Vietnam. 

In 1994 you published a photo of a vulture stalking a starving child during a famine in Sudan.

In 1995 you published a photo of 1-year-old Baylee Almon’s bloodied body as firefighter Chris Fields held her in his arms after the Oklahoma City bombing. 

In 1999, you published a photo of 15-year-old Daniel Rohrbough lying dead on the sidewalk outside Columbine High School.

In 2004 you published multiple images of torture from the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq. 

In 2015, you published a photo of the drowned body of 2-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi after he washed up on a Turkish beach. 

In 2019, you published a photo of the drowned bodies of Salvadoran migrants Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 2-year-old daughter lying facedown on banks of the Rio Grande after they attempted to cross into the United States. 

And there is also, who could forget, the videos of George Floyd and Rodney King. 

The existence of these photos in the historical record refutes two arguments that I have read against publishing graphic photographs of school shooting victims. First, that it wouldn’t make a difference. Perhaps, but doubtful. Even still, without getting too deep into the weeds about what making a difference actually looks like and how you would measure it — marches? new laws? greater charitable donations? — it is hard to deny the emotional impact these images had by presenting to Americans what had been up until that point withheld from public view: the violence and dehumanization at the core of the photo’s respective crisis or emergency.

It is one thing to read the descriptions of school shootings, like this one from an AP story about the day jurors in the Parkland shooting trial were shown images from the massacre — “photos of bodies inside classrooms included one boy bent backward over his seat, his body almost forming a U-shape. Blood pooled beneath him.” — and it’s another thing entirely to see those photos.

Americans deserve to know what it looks like when (also from that story) “one girl had her head blown open, while another had the front of her right shoulder blade missing” and until we do, we are unable to have an informed debate about school shootings, and we cannot have an informed debate without the truth. Your core principle is revealing the truth. Such photos, however horrific, are the truth. Give us the truth. 

Which brings me to the second argument: that publishing graphic photos dehumanizes and disrespects the victims. I am not so cavalier that I cannot acknowledge there is a meaningful difference between the photo of a body mutilated by bullets and the photo of a drowned body, but in the range of photos above I cannot locate a coherent set of guidelines or even so much as a rule of thumb for what should be published and what should not. The decisions to publish those graphic photos appear to depend on a case-by-case calculation that factors in the ethnicity, nationality, gender and age of the victim, the location and time of the tragedy, the “type” of tragedy, and, of course, the aesthetics of the picture itself. I’m not criticizing this. But to dismiss out of hand publishing photos of school shooting victims because they are too gory or disturbing is contradicted by your previous editorial decisions. 

But beyond that, knowing what you know about what those photos have come to mean for our collective memory and the historical record would still argue that their publication dehumanized or disrespected the victims? If anything, the photos redeemed the victims and rescued their tragedy (and other’s) from a meaningless obscurity that so many human beings, caught in the pinions of history, are banished to while the rest of us continue to scroll or order in. Those photos turned each of those individuals from a statistic into an actual human being with a name that we can read, say and remember. 

Who among us can readily name even one victim of a single school shooting? And who among us can name at least one shooter? 

From an educator’s standpoint, the conversations you have with each other around the ethics and necessity of covering school shootings are infuriating to witness. A large part of that is how little (meaning, zero) agency educators have despite the disproportionate influence school shootings have on our psyches and profession.

I doubt few people who work in schools walk in every day fearful of a shooting, but I also doubt there are equally few for whom it is not far from their mind.

You find yourself scrutinizing the “weird” kid’s work. You pause a nanosecond longer after you hear a loud noise in the hall. You “laugh” when people ask you if you wear a bulletproof vest to school. You can’t even find the words when someone asks if you think teachers should be armed. You find yourself wondering where you could hide in your classroom. And in your darkest moments, you think about your own child and then wonder how far you would go to protect your students. 

I do not know of an educator who would not admit to thinking about at least some of these things.

Yet you tell us school shootings are exceedingly rare. That 99% of gun deaths in the U.S. are not school shootings, that most don’t involve semi-automatic rifles, and that most school shootings aren’t mass shootings anyway. (That the “rare” argument unwittingly lends credence to the delusional conservative position that guns aren’t the problem, culture is — and so ipso facto if it just so happens we have a few school shootings each year, then, well, it’s the school’s fault since they missed the red flags — simply adds insult to injury.) 

So we teach your children and hold our breaths waiting for the next school shooting and when it happens seethe at the depraved, ineffectual responses from lawmakers and numbly read the cut-and-paste coverage that, a quarter century on, has inured all of us to this shameful crisis that has left hundreds of children dead, and with certain death awaiting many, many more.

I can’t say specifically what will happen if you chose to publish graphic images from school shootings. Maybe enough Republican lawmakers would say enough is enough. Maybe the images would trigger a nationwide school walkout. Maybe more states will hold more frequent gun buybacks. Maybe the pictures would inspire a rash of copycats. Maybe video games companies would agree to tone down the violence. Two weeks ago I saw an otherwise very nice seeming father at the beach with his wife and two young daughters and was appalled to see that he was wearing a baseball hat with the silhouette of an AR-15 emblazoned over an American flag — maybe seeing on the website of his local newspaper what that weapon did to a child’s body his daughters’ age would help him see his gun idolatry for what it is — silly, paranoid, dangerous. And maybe, just maybe, he would say enough is enough.

Or maybe nothing will happen at all. 

But I doubt that. 

End our nightmare. 

Publish those photos. 

With respect,

Cafeteria Duty

Above image: The Cry, Peter Hoag, 1955, Smithsonian American Art Museum

1. The number of school shootings when I started writing this two weeks ago.