Slain Nashville school shooting suspect was a 28-year-old woman: police https://t.co/p3HNzxc9AF
— Raw Story (@RawStory) March 27, 2023
"All of the remaining students were able to be escorted out of the building with faculty and staff," Kendra Loney of the Nashville fire department said.
"We were on scene to help them mitigate anyone from seeing exactly what else was going on," she said.
"But we are sure that they heard the chaos that was surrounding this, so we do have mental health specialists and professionals that are at that reunification site for both the students and the families."
This raises an interesting point.
We have several generations now, starting with Boomers, raised on TV and movie images of gunfire and the results. It started out bloodless, even wound-less (the guys in white hats always "shot the gun out" of the bad guy's hands. No idea how that was supposed to work, but it invented the "good guys with a gun" trope). When we played with toy guns as kids we fell over just like they did on TV. It was as far from reality as possible, but it was "reality" to us. Mostly, it still is.
Yeah, Tarentino shows you blood and gore, but not really. Bodies ripped apart; heads blown half off; massive trauma and exsanguination? Yeah, you don't really see that. Even in real killings we "mitigate anyone from seeing exactly what else was going on."
In the case of the people in that school, that's an excellent thing. Very sound, very reasonable. And do we publicize crime scene photos later? How much later?
But if we saw the true consequences of such violence? If we saw the photos of bloody, shattered bodies, or viscera and bone exposed in the explosion of force from bullets? Would it be even harder to claim these are 'crisis actors' or "deep fakes," or more generally that real death didn't come to real human bodies, child and adult? Might we then move this discussion from the abstraction of "gun control" and "Constitutional rights" to the bloody, carnal reality of death at the hands of people with high-powered weapons? Might we begin to realize what we are talking about when we defend abstractions in the face of horror, a horror even Hollywood doesn't put on screen?
The 129th mass shooting of 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, occurred at a school with an enrollment of around 209, CNN reports.
2023 is not yet 90 days old.
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