What I'm reading: “The Dead Children We Must See,” by Jay Caspian Kang.

Empty chairs displaying the names of students killed during school shootings are shown during an event on the National Mall calling for action on preventing gun violence on September 13, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images).

“I should have strapped a GoPro camera to my head and shown the world what we were seeing in those early days of Covid,” a New York ER doctor told me last year. “I would’ve been fired, but it would have been worth it. Think of all the lives I would have saved.”

I think about this a lot. Do medical privacy laws—and journalistic standards—shield the public from seeing things that would change how they feel. Would images of rows of patients in comas and on ventilators dying of Covid in New York have given pause to those who weren’t yet worried?

I also have thought deeply about whether the public needs to see what virtually every ER doctor has seen: what weapons of war on our streets can do to young human bodies.

It’s all too easy to focus on everything but the gruesome reality of what victims of gun violence look like. Instead of confronting the physical reality of what gun violence does to its victims, we collectively participate in what has become a mourning ritual in American life, which I wrote about several years ago.

Would people feel differently if they could see what I’ve seen? Would seeing the reality of these scenes change anyone’s mind regarding gun safety legislation that could both save lives and remove the growing specter of terror from our communities? I’m not sure. At this point, though, I’m willing to consider anything.

For quite some time, I had been considering writing a piece about this exact issue. Should media coverage of mass shootings include uncomfortably gruesome images of the human body? A new article entitled “The Dead Children We Must See,” by Jay Caspian Kang published in The New Yorker goes exactly where I might have gone. The piece presents the right questions, and leans towards what I believe the right answer may well be, though I admit ambivalence (in the literal sense of that word). Yes, the public's sanitized experience of mass shootings—teddy bear vigils, rather than images that could have been lifted from a horror movie—might prevent some people from fully understanding the calamities we have elected to permit in this country. But the decision to share (or not share) images of the victims’ destroyed faces and torn bodies must reside with the families of the deceased. The default position must be privacy.

That, however, is not where it ends. To further explore this, here are several quotations from Jay Caspian Kang’s New Yorker article, introduced by my own thoughts:

1. You can’t really picture what happens to the victims. Whatever you’ve seen in the movies is not the same as real life. (An on-stage portrayal of a shooting in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist play Gloria was so realistic, though, that it disturbs me to this day.):

“Every time I hear about a shooting at a school, I picture my own children looking up with surprise as the gunman walks through the door. But our imaginations tend to stop short, in part because the vast majority of us have never seen actual carnage.”

2. There is a sense that the mainstream media is the ultimate gate-keeper here. To an extent, that is true. But as Jay Caspian Kang writes, it eventually won’t be:

“The dam—which currently is held in place by the standards of news organizations and by law-enforcement organizations who, for understandable reasons, have tightly guarded these crime-scene photos—will inevitably break. At some point, we will see these children, and journalists will then be faced with the question of whether they should offer up a more sanitized version of what the rest of the world has already seen.”

3. Some victims’ families have indeed granted major media publications permission to publish graphic images of their murdered loved-ones. The reasons why the Washington Post chose not to (in a recent photo essay that revealed everything but the victims themselves) is worth pondering. The question arises: Who exactly is being protected if not the grieving families themselves? Does the objection of one family to the publication of images of other victims override the rights of other families to choose differently? Kang discusses the Post’s editorial choice:

“In her editor’s note, Buzbee mentions that the Post talked to families of the victims, some of whom were willing to grant permission to publish photographs of their dead relatives. But the paper ultimately decided that “the potential harm to victims’ families outweighed any potential journalistic value of showing recognizable bodies….There is also the question of why the Post would set aside the consent of victims’ families to protect them from the potential harm of what they had agreed to do.”

4. This choice comes with costs, Kang argues. This is a point with which I am sympathetic:

The taboo on showing the aftermath of this violence does not exist as merely some marker of civilized society—of good taste. It comes from those who, for whatever reason, are squeamish about putting names and faces to the escalating body count, who want to keep everything abstract.

5. Finally, Kang comes down on the side of transparency.

There is no question that images of dead children carry an immense amount of weight, which, in turn, must be handled responsibly. But that does not mean that any attempt to get the public to see them is automatically manipulative or propagandistic. It is far more manipulative to edit out the dead children or to hide them under a veil of solemnity and manners.

In the end, I respect the viewpoint that says the decision to share gruesome images of murdered children does not belong to me, a mere ER doctor awaiting the next ambulance. Rather, the choice belongs to the bereaved. For too long though—I have come to believe—the choice has belonged not to them, but instead to editors and publishers who have far less at stake.

Perhaps occasionally looking at images which are evocative and yet devoid of violence—like those tragically empty chairs on the National Mall in Washington D.C., or else sweet photos of innocent children before they were murdered—is enough. Maybe confronting the public with the blood and guts of the deceased really would change nothing. Whatever the right answer is, the status quo isn’t working.

Please add your comments and questions below.