Words aren't enough. We need to show carnage to stop school shootings

Sometimes, fire needs to be fought with fire.

Emmett Till, Vietnam and Ray Rice have taught us that, and now we have the technology that would bring hell to any lawmaker cowardly enough to make decisions that would allow the plague of school shootings to continue festering the country.

It’s time to use it.

Ask parents to share photos of carnage

Mamie Till-Mobley died 20 years ago, but maybe her memory can lead us out of this valley of terror?

We’ve tried social media campaigns, marches and rallies. We’ve tried political pressure. We’ve tried to destigmatize depression and anxiety.

Deranged people with weapons of war are still attacking children at schools.

In response, people of conscience need to consider something that should be unfathomable: We should ask parents from Newtown, Uvalde and Parkland to share the photos and videos of their dead children.

It’s not a new suggestion. Writers have been putting it forward for years in traditional spaces, including The Los Angeles Times and digital outlets such as Daily Kos.

I’d like to escalate that to suggest any elected official who has to make a vote on gun control proposals be required to wear a virtual reality headset and walk through the aftermath of one of these attacks.

Even 1 school shooting is too many

I don’t raise this lightly, but we live in a visual society where people don’t believe things unless they see them.

Maybe images of dead children will be enough to overcome all the justifications, excuses and distortions that allow a deadly matrix of gun manufacturers, arms dealers and maniacs to keep putting our kids at risk?

If it sounds morbid, that’s because it is.

There will be opponents of this idea who say that school shootings aren’t as big of a problem as the media would suggest.

There are about 65,000 elementary schools in the U.S., according to the trade group We Are Teachers. There have been nearly 400 school shootings since Columbine, according to a Washington Post database.

I would counter that by saying one is too many and that anyone who would uphold the status quo after seeing clusters of tiny, bullet-riddled bodies next to Spiderman backpacks and Disney lunchboxes isn’t fit to hold office.

Emmett Till showed us power of an image

Maybe a such a requirement would lead to legislation so strict that we would ban everything from AR-15s to first-person shooter-style video games?

It’s a digital-age update to a choice Mamie Till made when her son, Emmett, was kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1955. Emmett was just 14 when he was lynched over lies about him flirting with a white woman.

The boy had been so brutalized that his body was unrecognizable when it was discovered days after his death, except for a ring on Emmett’s finger that had belonged to his father.

Mamie Till decided that her boy would have an open casket funeral.

The images shocked the world and galvanized the Civil Rights movement into creating lasting changes.

Vietnam photos made us question the war

Vietnam was similar in that it was images that finally turned public opinion enough to bring our troops home.

Everyone who cared knew what was happening. U.S. troops were fighting in jungles, and “frontlines” were anywhere and everywhere.

After shooting: Arizona shool safety requirements vary widely

But there was something about the photos that literally made people see thing differently, especially images that showed heavily armed Americans looming over Vietnamese villagers.

Were our men really aiming guns at unarmed women and children, many barefoot, some naked? Could anyone have believed the story of “Napalm Girl” without seeing her for themselves?

Robert Pledge, co-founder of Contact Press Images, wrote of one such picture for TIME magazine, asking, “Who is the enemy here? The soldier, seen from the back, facing a Vietnamese woman hugging a baby, with a half-naked boy by her side? Or is it the young woman and her two children being confronted by an American GI? Are there not always two sides to a coin?”

Ray Rice never played again after video

No. There aren’t always two sides. Not when it comes to school shootings.

We have to consider radical measures to stop a radical problem. We can’t be as calloused going forward as we have been looking back.

It was the same way with domestic violence in sports.

We had heard stories of athletes abusing their wives and girlfriends for decades.

Ray Rice's domestic violence case came across no different, except he would never play in the NFL again following the surfacing of video showing him brutally striking his fiancée on an elevator.

The details of that story had been public for months with attorneys downplaying the assault as a “very minor physical altercation.”

Then people saw what happened for themselves, and that’s when Rice’s career fell apart.

Unlike Till and Vietnam, however, this was a video, and it sparked reactions that shape public opinion to this day, nearly 10 years later.

This is traumatic, but so is the alternative

Again, I don’t say this lightly.

Even asking the victims’ families to agree to such a project would be traumatizing for all involved, including the reporters posing the question. But the alternative is too much to bear.

History tells us that it won’t be long before we can expect another school shooting … or church shooting … or concert shooting … or … you get the point.

We have to try something new. In this case, we need to show people what’s being ignored.

Release the photos. Play the videos. Create horrific interactives.

Sometimes, fire must be fought with fire.

So what if we use technology to bring hell to anyone defending the status quo? Maybe then things can finally change?

In this case, words have not been enough.

Reach Moore at gmoore@azcentral.com or 602-444-2236. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @SayingMoore.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: School shootings will continue unless we show the atrocities