The Grisly Destruction of Assault Rifles; Wounds With No Repair

Emergency room surgeons tell us that once someone is shot in the core, hope is gone because there is nothing left to repair.

Photo by Dominik Sostmann on Unsplash

Names of places we would never know, never visit, and probably in the whole of our life even know existed sit in a repository in all of our brains, a special place of photo shoots of hell. Whether you're religious or not, if you believe in one God, none or many, this little area in your brain sits there holding, as though precious, the names, the stories, and the horrors perpetrated at schools by people with assault rifles.

These weren’t special schools; they were schools for kids who lived in our neighborhoods, delivered our newspapers, and dug sandcastles on our beaches. This was the generation we looked forward to watching mature into wonderful, loving adults. But all that ended one day when someone went into a store or a gun show and selected a lethal weapon, an assault rifle with extra cartridge containers. Yes, they were hunters, but hunters of children, not wild animals or enemies on the field of battle.

No parent group wants to see these images, especially the latest 19 from the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas because they're too disturbing. Few, if anyone, will have the courage in a moment of incredible grief shown by Mamie Till, who demanded her son, Emmett, have an open coffin for all to see the damage done by hateful men.

Now, we have hateful younger men causing incalculable damage to generations. The dead will suffer no more, but the living will carry this with them for the rest of their lives. It was not an incident confined to one day in the year; the psychological pain remains for decades. I wonder what researchers will follow that 4th-grade class as a researcher in the past followed a group of young men into their older ages to see how their careers developed and what affected them.

If we saw what those bullets do, we might have a sleepless night or an additional concern about our children. But those who had to come to what they thought was a rescue of children brought out of that 4th-grade classroom will never forget their feelings of helplessness. These weren’t wounds typically called GSW (gunshot wounds). Assault rifles make no exceptions; they explode on impact with a human body. The bullet doesn't care if it's an adult or a small child--they all receive the same explosion.

As one trauma surgeon said, “I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?” There was no hope, he knew.

The philosophical question is now being asked if the media or any other institution, organization, or person will decide that we need to see these images, not hear about what happened. After all, we are a visually-oriented society, and we're used to seeing video horror films and programs that terrorize us, but all for entertainment. The photos I'm discussing wouldn't be entertaining unless the person viewing them has a severe mental disorder.

Those inclined not to show the photos of the children in the Uvalde classroom point out that the three-year-old boy lying dead on a beach did little to move people, and they've given examples of other photos, but Mrs. Till’s photo did bring some change with the shock. Can we afford to accept the premise that showing instead of telling is good? I'm constantly being reminded that I should always show and not just tell in my writing. Here we're getting the reverse.

The other day while listening to a book on the environment and how the Army Corps of Engineers has been involved in multiple disasters, the writer mentioned an ancient philosopher, Heraclitus, who said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” The quote is apt because we are not at the same time, and we are not the same people, so how can you compare the little boy dead on the shore with what happened in Uvalde?

I don't have to wax philosophical because it's evident that we're not the same people, and we won't be tomorrow or next year or the next decade because we will be changing, in some cases ever so little, as the times change. Yes, we can never step into the same world that existed that day in Columbine or Uvalde. We know that the past is history, and we don't want to repeat it. But, it appears that we are doing precisely that, repeating it.

Were there children killed in the Twin Towers on 9/11? No, you probably don’t know because no one talks about it. We did hear that children in a local school, who were looking up at the buildings, reported birds flying from the windows. I wonder how that was explained to them.

No, we didn't see any photos of children or other people who died that day. Maybe it was for political reasons or to protect our sensibilities. We'll never know. Who can say what it would have done either positively or negatively?

The times have changed since Columbine, but the sale of assault rifles goes on, as does the killing. Would showing the physical damage caused by these guns make any difference? Should we stand and assume it would be too much to look at the grizzly photos? If we do nothing and we protect ourselves in this way, how can we make any difference with the availability of assault rifles? You figure that one out because I sure don't have an answer.

Our children are being sent to school as lambs to the slaughter, and the Senate sits on their hands watching the crowd go by to their funerals.