My Thoughts Exactly

As hard as it may be for the relatives of the victims, we need to publicly broadcast the horrific images of the mass shooting victims, much like Emmet Till's mother insisted that the brutality visited against him be made public:

Emmett Till's mother was right. After the horrific murder of her 14-year-old son in Mississippi in 1955, she decided on an open-casket funeral. "There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way," she said. "And I wanted the world to see." The graphic images of her son's mutilated body, printed in The Chicago Defender and Jet magazine, contained vastly more raw power than any verbal description could possibly have had.

We sometimes say that "words fail us," and it's true. Nothing we can say can pack the emotional punch of what we can see with our own eyes. For those of us who support a level of gun control in the United States equivalent to that in other advanced countries, it ought to be clear by now that facts and logic are not enough to change public policy on the issue. We need ugly pictures. Not the pictures of the sweet faces of the children of Newtown, Conn., before they were slaughtered, but the awful sights that so shocked the first responders.

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I think that gun control has now become as emotionally charged and intractable as civil rights and the Vietnam War once were. The American College of Physicians was joined in 2015 by nearly 60 other organizations, including the American Public Health Association and the American Bar Association, in a call to address gun violence as a public-health threat. Last month, in Annals of Internal Medicine, the physicians' group issued a position paper with recommendations for reducing firearms-related injuries and deaths. The National Rifle Association responded with a tweet that read, "Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control."

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News organizations, law-enforcement agencies and medical professionals are unlikely to publish the images of the bloody, mangled bodies that gun violence produces. But husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, can do what Emmett Till's mother did. They can insist that we see the result of our weak, ineffective and poorly enforced gun policies. They can find ways to publish the pictures in all their gory detail.

Some might say this would disrespect the dead. I can think of no more respectful way to treat the dead than to allow the loved ones of those who have been slain to show what actually happened to them. If we think these images are too awful to see, then we should change the circumstances that create them.

Mamie Till-Mobley died in 2003 at the age of 81 and was buried near her son. Her monument reads, "Her pain united a nation." May the pain felt today by the loved ones of the victims of gun violence do the same.

This is a big sacrifice to be asked of grieving parents, but it needs to be done.