would releasing crime scene photos of victims of these massacres sway public opinion on gun laws?

[crickets]

34. The photo of Gerri Santoro was mishandled.

She was treated as an anonymous victim; no one really thought at the time of the toll it could take on her loved ones. It should not have been published without the family's permission, yet it likely would never have been published if permission had been sought then. Times have changed, and the family has since altered their stance about the photograph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerri_Santoro (warning-graphic)

https://www.wbur.org/artery/2019/12/03/leonas-sister-gerri-storytelling-abortion-debate

Over the years, Joannie and Leona came to see the image as a necessary tool in the fight for equality and bodily autonomy. Gillooly said that every woman involved in the film told her about their own abortion stories. She chose to keep the focus on Gerri with one exception. Gerri’s oldest daughter, Judy Blare, who had an abortion as a teenager and now regrets it. In the film she said she says she’s a pro-life Christian who doesn’t agree with abortion anymore, but that others should still have a choice.

“We have a God given right for lack of anything better to call it, that’s why we’re given a brain,” Blare says in the film. “Certainly I would never want someone to tell me what I could or couldn’t do.”

My point in going over all of this is to illustrate how powerful a photograph can be in showing the public the reality of a situation. If properly handled with consent of the families, photos of the aftermath of a shooting could go a very long way toward showing people just what kind of real life, not part of a screenplay butchery guns are capable of.

There's a reason every war since Vietnam has been sanitized on the news. I grew up seeing the photos, the magazine covers, and the news clips as a child. It's no wonder that the majority of the US citizenry had no stomach for that war after seeing, night after night on the news, what their young men were going through.

With permission from families, and given the stakes involved, I'm pretty sure you can find some who are willing to allow the photos to be shown. Show them. Show them in vivid color. Those cut down in mass shootings deserve for everyone to understand just how they were murdered in cold blood, and how their deaths might have been prevented with better gun legislation. Yes, gun legislation can work to stem violence.


https://fortune.com/2018/02/20/australia-gun-control-success/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/23/mass-shootings-response-other-countries-gun-laws/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/11/08/thousand-oaks-shooting-australia-no-mass-shootings-since-1996/1934798002/


I know that other countries are not the same as the US, are not so steeped in gun culture, but the point is that the effort does work given proper programs put in place, and given time. There is a strong will for change in this country regarding gun laws, in spite of the small but loud minority who continue to resist, and in spite of many in Congress beholden to the NRA. Regardless of the "nothing will happen" crowd who crop up every time to pooh-pooh, it is possible to do something about this. We just have to DO IT.