Would Showing Graphic Images of Mass Shootings Spur Action to Stop Them? | The New Yorker

The root of their pain lay in the photographs’ gruesome specificity and its capacity to answer in precise detail questions that were too lurid to have occurred otherwise: how the bodies lay; how the dead faces were contorted; how the spatters of blood patterned the walls. Many in the courtroom, journalists and family members alike, averted their eyes. It seemed that the cumulative detail of those images could tell them little that they did not already know: nine people were dead for no other reason than the color of their skin.