Portrait, Michael Moore, 04/03/09. (photo: Ann-Christine Poujoulat/Getty)
13 March 10
he
year was 1955. Emmett Till was a young African American boy from
Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi. One day Emmett was seen
"flirting" with a white woman in town, and for that he was mutilated and
murdered at the age of fourteen. He was found with part of a cotton gin
tied around his neck with a string of barbed wire. His killers, two
white men, had shot him in the head before they dumped him in the river.
Emmett Till's body was found and returned to Chicago.
To the shock of many, his mother insisted on an open casket at his
funeral so that the public could see what happens to a little boy's body
when bigots decide he is less than human. She wanted photographers to
take pictures of her mutilated son and freely publish them. More than
10,000 mourners came to the funeral home, and the photo of Emmett Till
appeared in newspapers and magazines across the nation.
"I just wanted the world to see," she said. "I just wanted the world to see."
The world did see,
and nothing was ever the same again for the white supremacists of the
United States of America. Because of Emmett Till, because of that
shocking photograph of this little dead boy, just a few months later,
"the revolt officially began on December 1, 1955" (from Eyes on the Prize)
when Rosa Parks decided not to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery,
Alabama. The historic bus boycott began and, with the images of Emmett
Till still fresh in the minds of many Americans, there was no turning
back.
In March of 1965, the police of Selma, Alabama,
brutally beat, hosed and tear-gassed a group of African Americans for
simply trying to cross a bridge during a protest march. The nation was
shocked by images of blacks viciously maimed and injured. So, too, was
the President. Just one week later, Lyndon Johnson called for a
gathering of the U.S. Congress and he went and stood before them in
joint session and told them to pass a bill he was introducing that night
- the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And, just five months later, President
Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
In March, 1968, U.S. soldiers massacred 500 civilians
at My Lai in Vietnam. A year and a half later, the world finally saw the
photographs - of mounds of dead peasants covered in blood, a terrified toddler seconds before he was gunned down, and a woman with her brains literally blown out of her head.
(These photos would join other Vietnam War photos, including a naked
girl burned by napalm running down the road, and a South Vietnamese
general walking up to a handcuffed suspect, taking out his handgun, and
blowing the guy's brains out on the NBC Nightly News.)
With this avalanche of horrid images, the American
public turned against the Vietnam War. Our realization of what we were
capable of rattled us so deeply it became very hard for future
presidents (until George W. Bush) to outright invade a sovereign nation
and go to war there for a decade.
Bush was able to pull it off because his handlers,
Misters Cheney and Rumsfeld, knew that the most important thing to do
from the get-go was to control the images of the war, to guarantee that
nothing like a My Lai-style photograph ever appeared in the U.S. press.
And that is why you never see a picture any more of
the kind of death and destruction that might make you get up off your
couch and run out of the house screaming bloody murder at those
responsible for these atrocities.
That is why now, after the children's massacre in
Newtown, the absolute last thing the National Rifle Association wants
out there in the public domain is ANY images of what happened that
tragic day.
But I have a prediction. I believe someone in Newtown,
Connecticut - a grieving parent, an upset law enforcement officer, a
citizen who has seen enough of this carnage in our country - somebody,
someday soon, is going to leak the crime scene photos of the Sandy Hook
Elementary School massacre. And when the American people see what
bullets from an assault rifle fired at close range do to a little
child's body, that's the day the jig will be up for the NRA. It will be
the day the debate on gun control will come to an end. There will be
nothing left to argue over. It will just be over. And every sane
American will demand action.
Of course, there will be a sanctimonious hue and cry
from the pundits who will decry the publication of these gruesome
pictures. Those who do publish or post them will be called "shameful"
and "disgraceful" and "sick." How could a media outlet be so insensitive to the families of the dead children! Someone will then start a boycott of the magazine or website that publishes them.
But this will be a false outrage. Because the real
truth is this: We do not want to be confronted with what the actual
results of a violent society looks like. Of what a society that starts
illegal wars, that executes criminals (or supposed criminals), that
strikes or beats one of its women every 15 seconds, and shoots 30 of its
own citizens every single day looks like. Oh, no, please - DO NOT MAKE
US LOOK AT THAT!
Because if we were to seriously look at the 20
slaughtered children - I mean really look at them, with their bodies
blown apart, many of them so unrecognizable the only way their parents
could identify them was by the clothes they were wearing - what would be
our excuse not to act? Now. Right now. This very instant! How on earth
could anyone not spring into action the very next moment after seeing the bullet-riddled bodies of these little boys and girls?
We don't know exactly what those Newtown photographs show. But I want you - yes, you, the person reading this right now - to think about what we do know:
The six-year and seven-year-old children killed at
Sandy Hook Elementary School were each hit up to eleven times by a
Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. The muzzle velocity of a rifle
like the AR-15 is about three times that of a handgun. And because the
kinetic energy of a bullet equals one-half of the bullet's mass
multiplied by its velocity squared, the potential destructive power of a
bullet fired from a rifle is about nine times more than that of a
similar bullet fired from a handgun.
Nine times more. I spoke to Dr. Victor Weedn, chairman
of the Department of Forensic Sciences at George Washington University,
who told me that chest x-rays of a person shot with a rifle will often
look like a "snowstorm" because their bones will have been shattered
into fragments. This happens not just because of the bullet's direct
impact, but because each bullet sends a shock wave through the body's
soft organs - one so powerful it can break bones even when the bullet
didn't hit them. A video here shows what the shock wave looks like in
the "ballistic gelatin" used by experts to simulate human tissue. (Would
Gabby Giffords have survived if shot by a rifle rather than a Glock
pistol? Probably not, says Dr. Weedn; the shock wave would have damaged
the most critical parts of her brain.)
As horrifying as this is, there's more; much more. Dr.
Cyril Wecht, past president of the American Academy of Forensic
Sciences, told me this:
The kind of ammunition used by the Newtown killer would have produced very extensive, severe and mutilating injuries of the head and face in these small victims. Depending on the number of shots striking a child's head, substantial portions of the head would be literally blasted away. The underlying brain tissue would be extensively lacerated with portions of hemorrhagic brain tissue protruding through the fractured calvarium and basilar skull, some of which would remain on portions of the face...actual physical identification of each child would have been extremely difficult, and in many instances impossible, even by the parents of any particular child.
We also know this, according to Dr. Wecht:
In one case, the parents have commented publicly upon the damage to their child, reporting that his chin and left hand were missing. Most probably, this child had brought his hand up to his face in shock and for protection and had the hand blasted away along with the lower part of his face.
Veronique Pozner, the mother of Noah, the six-year-old
boy described by Dr. Wecht, insisted that the Governor of Connecticut
look at Noah in an open casket. "I needed it to be real to him," she
said. The Governor wept.
The pictures showing all this exist right now,
somewhere in the police and medical examiner's files in Connecticut. And
as of right now, we've somehow all decided together that we don't need
to look, that in some way we're okay with what's in those pictures
(after all, over 2,600 Americans have been killed by guns since Newtown) - just as long as we don't have to look at the pictures ourselves.
But I am telling you now, that moment will come with
the Newtown photos - and you will have to look. You will have to look at
who and what we are, and what we've allowed to happen. At the end of
World War II, General Eisenhower ordered that thousands of German
civilians be forced to march through the concentration camps so they
could witness what was happening just down the road from them during the
years that they turned their gaze away, or didn't ask, or didn't do
anything to stop the murder of millions.
We've done nothing since Columbine - nothing -
and as a result there have been over 30 other mass shootings since
then. Our inaction means that we are all, on some level, responsible -
and therefore, because of our burying our heads in the sand, we must be
forced to look at the 20 dead children at Sandy Hook Elementary.
The people we've voted for since Columbine - with the
exception of Michael Bloomberg - almost none of them, Democrat or
Republican, dared to speak out against the NRA before Newtown - and yet
we, the people, continued to vote for them. And for that we are
responsible, and that is why we must look at the 20 dead children.
Most of us continue to say we "support the Second
Amendment" as if it were written by God (or we're just afraid of being
seen as anti-American). But this amendment was written by the same white
men who thought a Negro was only 3/5 human. We've done nothing to
revise or repeal this - and that makes us responsible, and that is why
we must look at the pictures of the 20 dead children laying with what's
left of their bodies on the classroom floor in Newtown, Connecticut.
And while you're looking at the heinous photographs,
try saying those words out loud: "I support the Second Amendment!"
Something, I'm guessing, won't feel right.
Yes, someday a Sandy Hook mother - or a Columbine
mother, or an Aurora mother, or a mother from massacres yet to come -
will say, like the mother of Emmett Till, "I just want the world to
see." And then nothing about guns in this country will ever be the same
again.
Pack your bags, NRA - you're about to be shown the
door. Because we refuse to let another child die in this manner. Got it?
I hope so.
All you can do now is hope no one releases those photos.
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