Content warning: this article discusses gun violence. Reader discretion is advised.

America. Land of the free, home of the brave, so we’re told.
It’s not irregular these days to wake up to a news alert that flips this phrase on its head. “X number dead, X number injured in shooting at Y location:” copied and pasted from last week’s headline, or the week before that, or the week before that.
Freedom takes the form of a gun, available for purchase with or without a permit in some states. Bravery isn’t shielded by a bulletproof vest or supplemented by a $1.54 trillion defense budget. It’s running in the street, crouching behind church pews and cornering in classrooms, lights out and doors locked.
In the land of opportunity, many live and die from decisions made by those in power, spineless and docile in greed. In the land of opportunity, every state has been impacted by the epidemic of mass shootings.
The Gun Violence Archive says that in 2023, there were 658 mass shootings in the U.S.
658.
Sit with that for just a moment.
That’s 657 more than we needed to learn our lesson. But again, that’s only in 2023. From 2015 to 2022, over 19,000 people were killed or injured in a mass shooting. Each of those lives and the people connected to them are forever changed in a matter of seconds.
It’s shocking, it’s heartbreaking and it’s disgusting. But it’s still a statistic, and hard to wrap the brain around. Until now.
On Nov. 16, 2023, The Washington Post published a piece in their “American Icon” series, which focuses on the destruction wrought by AR-15s. This piece, entitled “Terror on Repeat: A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings” is not a standard news story. The grisly image of an AR-15 is the first thing the reader sees. In front of it, a panel warns viewers of the content below, and an explanation for the Post’s decision to publish the piece is linked.
The article pulls from photographs, videos and police files from 11 mass shootings from 2012 to 2023, several of which were never before published for legal reasons or to protect the privacy of victims’ families.
Split into three chronological parts to cover a shooting as it unfolds, the images and coverage of events are interspersed with quotes from witnesses and survivors.
The images are horrifying. Unspeakable, even. But silence won’t change anything, so let’s speak.
The photos did to me what I’m sure they were intended to do for many readers; they threw normalcy out of the realm of discussion. What I saw as a reader could in no way be described as normal. They could be described as a lot of things, but ultimately, they are distinctly American.
No other country lives and dies this way. Time after time we pin an individual shooter and what led them to enact such violence. When will we acknowledge that the only common thread is the weapon itself? Blood in these images, in these lives, pools the same. To ignore the pattern — to think that each case is a unique devastation — is to ignore reality.
We live at a time in this epidemic where the culture has noticed and normalized this kind of tragedy. It’s made its way into films, some more tasteful than others. It’s the focus of young adult novels and music and was even used as a point of relatability in an ad for Biore skincare.
It’s so frequent that some Americans have lived through more than one mass shooting. Children of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting are now old enough to retell their stories, as profiled by Elle magazine.
It takes up a not insignificant amount of our zeitgeist. The fact that we can acknowledge this crisis in art and even in the glamorized world of advertising, but not in reality, goes to show that there’s a disconnect here. If it’s enough to talk about in media, it should be important enough to talk about in the real world.
Our focus on the individual, be they victim or shooter, happens because it’s something we can mourn. We can mourn the safety that used to be in a space, or the lives that victims led. We can create characters in fiction and bring the “hero” and “villain” tropes to the real world. The ambiguity of what really happens in one of these shootings is perhaps what has held some of us back from action.
That’s what these pictures intend to do. They aren’t as incomprehensible as a statistic, not fictionalized like a film. This is real, and this is gruesome.
In the Post’s explanation behind publishing these images, Executive Editor Sally Buzbee writes that after careful deliberation, “we decided that there is public value in illuminating the profound and repeated devastation left by tragedies that are often covered as isolated news events but rarely considered as part of a broader pattern of violence.”
It is overwhelming, looking at the destruction. I felt denial and confusion, which turned to a deep sadness and an irreconcilable anger. Part of this may be because, as Buzbee points out, we as Americans are used to seeing such destruction only in international news coverage, where readers are less likely to have a connection.
It’s also important to acknowledge the privilege in denial and in avoidance. Condemning violence overseas or taking that violence as a given while refusing to acknowledge it in one’s own country is shallow. Or, to refuse to acknowledge that some of these massacres are motivated by hate to target certain groups is living in privilege. Not stepping outside of a limited worldview is part of how we got here in the first place.
Some people seem to check out of reality after that first glimpse of denial, at the uncomfortable fact that this happens close to home. How comfortable it must be, to attribute these statistics and bold headlines to a bad actor, a criminal, or someone with mental health issues.
If only someone had said something, if police had shown up sooner, if video games weren’t so violent and young men were raised with fathers and on and on and on — the reasons and consequences of massacre after massacre are specific. They don’t take in the whole picture. Politicians and commentators can focus on these specific casualties, denying the real pattern of violence.
But you cannot deny the blood on an elementary classroom floor, staining a wall of backpacks. You cannot deny a church like yours with splintered doors and gashes in the wall.
To see people deny the severity or even the existence of this problem is frustrating, and it isn’t easy to sit with.
It feels like nothing will stop this, that screaming for our lives doesn’t make a drop in the ocean of political conversation. We’ve been told by politicians that it’s out of their hands, as if the God that they send thoughts and prayers to will resolve this preventable tragedy.
Now, it’s not that I think deniers or scapegoaters would be interested in seeing these images and confronting this visceral reality. But publication and accessibility of these photos — the story was available without a subscription — is in my opinion a step in the right direction.
There’ve been 12 mass shootings so far in 2024 according to the Gun Violence Archive, and they won’t be the last. Whether you look at the pictures or don’t — both are understandable — what matters is that you now have a choice. So sit with the feelings that come along with this information and these visuals. You as an individual can feel the disbelief, the fear, the sadness and the anger that comes with acknowledging the state of this country. The last thing we need is more denial.