Photos only way toward action on gun safety

When I was about 10 years old, my uncle, drunk and distressed — as most of my male relatives were in those days — put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was found by his two pre-teen children, blood and brains all over the room. Naturally, they were never the same. How could you be after seeing such brutality?

The first responders who went into the Uvalde, Texas, elementary schoolroom and saw the damage a high-velocity, high-capacity weapon does to a classroom of fourth graders also will never be the same. Certain things, after all, you cannot un-see.

Unfortunately, the rest of us — especially lawmakers — will never see that carnage, so, just like after Sandy Hook, Columbine and Parkland, nothing will change. In the United States we accept massacred children as the price of the Second Amendment.

I think it’s time to remedy that. I want the folks for whom guns are God and the legislators who bow at the altar of the National Rifle Association to see — as a Texas sheriff described to reporters — “piles of children,” bloodied and covered by the lifeless bodies of teachers trying to protect them. I want them to see tiny humans so destroyed by an AR-15 that they had to be matched to their parents by DNA samples because they were unidentifiable any other way. Please continue reading here.