In March, 1968, U.S. soldiers massacred 500 civilians at My Lai in Vietnam. A year and a half later, the world finally saw the photographs - of mounds of dead peasants covered in blood, a terrified toddler seconds before he was gunned down, and a woman with her brains literally blown out of her head. (These photos would join other Vietnam War photos, including a naked girl burned by napalm running down the road, and a South Vietnamese general walking up to a handcuffed suspect, taking out his handgun, and blowing the guy’s brains out on the NBC Nightly News.) With this avalanche of horrid images, the American public turned against the Vietnam War. Our realization of what we were capable of rattled us so deeply it became very hard for future presidents (until George W. Bush) to outright invade a sovereign nation and go to war there for a decade.
One of the biggest reasons the Bush Administration was able to win and maintain dominion over the propaganda battle surrounding the Iraq war was that it controlled the images released to the media and, through them, to the public. The Iraq war was deliberately maintained as a charade, a sanitary, abstract concept…and so no one saw the truth of war. Except for those who fought it.
We may have seen pictures of flag-draped caskets (and damned few of those), but we were never allowed to see dead American soldiers. We were never allowed to witness the honesty of the horrific carnage war creates. Those charged with managing the messaging within the Bush Administration understood the power of imagery. They knew that if Americans had been allowed to see images of dead American soldiers, support for the war would have evaporated. By enforcing the fantasy of an antiseptic, bloodless war, by keeping images of broken and bloodied bodies under wraps, winning the propaganda war was easy.
So it is with gun massacres in this country. Moore’s argument is simple: allow Americans to see the truth of what happen at Sandy Hook. Let us see what the assault weapons so fiercely protected by the NRA, the Congress they’ve bought and paid for, and gun nuts do to human bodies. Let us see the carnage, because we should be able to see what Adam Lanza did to the children of Sandy Hook. I don’t agree with Moore’s prescription lightly; murders can be horrifically graphic and extremely disturbing…but that’s part of the argument. We should be able to have the truth- ALL of the truth- in order to be able to make an informed decision regarding gun control. Viewing the carnage Adam Lanza visited upon Newtown on that December morning is the truth, and we have a right to that truth.
This being the Internet Age, those pictures WILL be released by someone. It’s only a matter of time before we’re forced to confront the horrors we’ve condoned by our inattention to what the NRA has wrought.
Some may argue that the very idea of releasing such photos is inflammatory and designed to appeal to emotion and not reason. That’s the argument of someone who knows they can’t prevail. They know the only way they can win is to control the images the public is allowed to see…because he who controls the imagery controls the debate, right? When you know the truth isn’t on your side, what choice do you have but to ensure that your advisories aren’t allowed access to the truth?
Veronique Pozner, the mother of Noah, the six-year-old boy described by Dr. Wecht, insisted that the Governor of Connecticut look at Noah in an open casket. “I needed it to be real to him,” she said. The Governor wept.
The pictures showing all this exist right now, somewhere in the police and medical examiner’s files in Connecticut. And as of right now, we’ve somehow all decided together that we don’t need to look, that in some way we’re okay with what’s in those pictures (after all, over 2,600 Americans have been killed by guns since Newtown) - just as long as we don’t have to look at the pictures ourselves.
But I am telling you now, that moment will come with the Newtown photos - and you will have to look. You will have to look at who and what we are, and what we’ve allowed to happen.
We’ll have to look because we’re complicit. By continuing to elect public servants bought and paid for by the NRA, we’ve acquiesced to a political environment that’s allowed gun massacres to continue unabated.
The time has come for Americans to see the truth.
At the end of World War II, General Eisenhower ordered that thousands of German civilians be forced to march through the concentration camps so they could witness what was happening just down the road from them during the years that they turned their gaze away, or didn’t ask, or didn’t do anything to stop the murder of millions.
We’ve done nothing since Columbine - nothing - and as a result there have been over 30 other mass shootings since then. Our inaction means that we are all, on some level, responsible - and therefore, because of our burying our heads in the sand, we must be forced to look at the 20 dead children at Sandy Hook Elementary.
We don’t need assault weapons to feel free. Our freedom and liberty isn’t linked to the amount and variety of firepower we have access to. Weapons of war should be kept in the hands of those charged with fighting our wars. There’s simply no defensible reason for civilians being allowed to purchase and own assault weapons, which one purpose- killing human beings.
Certainly, the pictures of the Sandy Hook crime scene would be horrific and deeply, profoundly disturbing…and they should be. Just as Germans were forced to march through concentration camps, Americans should be able see what an assault weapon can do to a human body. That was why Veronique Pozner had her son’s funeral with an open casket. No one should have to confront such horror…and yet similar horrors will continue unless and until we have the opportunity to view photos of the 20 dead children.
It’s time to see the truth.
