Decades ago, photos of Emmett Till’s murdered body galvanized action for civil rights. Today, disturbing images could do the same for gun control.
In
the days since the Uvalde shooting, media outlets have shared heartbreaking
images of the small victims as they were cherished in life. As Americans, we’re
forced to look into their young, innocent eyes and accept our shame that we
failed to protect them.
What
we haven’t seen is what they looked like after their lives were ripped away by
AR-15 bullets. Many of the children were reportedly so mutilated they could
only be identified by DNA.
It
is understandable that a newspaper would be loath to publish such photographs.
Most human beings would be loath to look at them.
But
in the past, such disturbing images have been used to galvanize action — by
forcing us to examine painful realities. When I was a civil rights organizer in
the South back in the 1960s, one episode still loomed large in the minds of
those who took part in the freedom struggle.
On an August night in 1955, two white men forced their way into a house in rural Mississippi, and abducted a 14-year-old Black child from Chicago named Emmett Till. Emmett had been visiting his Mississippi relatives for the summer.
Earlier
that same day, in response to a “dare,” Emmett allegedly committed the “crime”
of whistling at a white woman in a local grocery store.
The
two men kidnapped Emmett and brutally beat and mutilated him before shooting
him in the head. Using barbed wire, they tied the dead teenager to a heavy
metal fan and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. His body wasn’t taken
from the river for another week.
His
mother insisted on an open casket funeral. “Everybody needs to know what
happened to Emmett Till,” she said.
Tens
of thousands viewed the body as it was, and Jet magazine
and the Chicago Defender ran photographs of the brutalized
child. The resulting anger and grief stiffened the determination of the civil
rights movement.
Just
as children in America today face the reality that a deranged or racist person
with an assault rifle can invade their school and take their lives, in 1955
young Black children in the South bore the knowledge that any white man who
chose to could pull them out of their home in the night and murder them — and
that their society would grant the killer complete impunity.
That
bitter knowledge helped mobilize a generation of African Americans and their
white allies to fight against segregation and white supremacy. Could the
horrific images of the unrecognizable bodies of murdered schoolchildren move
more Americans toward confronting our gun problem?
The
families of the Uvalde victims will make their own painful decisions regarding
the remains of their children. They owe us nothing — it is we who owe them our
shamed apologies for failing to protect their children from the now well-known
danger of mass murder.
No
one can demand the right to use photographs of the victims.
But
children aren’t the only ones whose bodies have been torn apart and rendered
unrecognizable by modern assault weapons. Photographs from both wartime and the
home front can doubtless be found to illustrate the costs of so-called “gun
rights.”
These
disturbing images could ignite the public conscience. They could also be put
before gun buyers themselves.
A
number of states force women exercising their constitutional right to abortion
to look at fetal sonograms before ending their pregnancy. What if states
required anyone who wants to buy an assault rifle, or other semi-automatic
weapon, to first see photos or films that show what such weapons do to human
bodies?
Some
buyers would no doubt harden their hearts and persuade themselves they must
have a weapon of war to defend their homes from an attack by imaginary hordes
or other fictitious threats — or to overthrow a government so tyrannical as to
consider regulating firearms.
But
perhaps some would reconsider whether they really need this kind of weapon to
hunt or engage in target shooting.
There
is no Second Amendment right to protection from reality.
