This week, a woman who lost a daughter at Robb Elementary took to social media for a different fight. Instead of powerful guns getting into the wrong hands, Kimberly Garcia, mother of 10-year-old Amerie Jo Garza, feared that graphic images from the massacre could be seen by millions, thanks to one of the nation’s largest newspapers.
“As some of you know by now the Washington Post is going to issue a very disturbing article on Thursday,” Garcia wrote in a note posted on X. “We would like to issue a statement asking everyone NOT TO SHARE instead share our loved ones pictures. We are trying to do as much damage control as possible BEFORE the article hits social media. Again, PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THE ARTICLE.”
Indeed, on Thursday morning, the Washington Post published a story titled "Terror on Repeat: A Rare Look at the Devastation Caused by AR-15 Shootings." In the article, the latest in the paper’s American Icon series focusing on AR-15 violence in the U.S., never-before-released images from Uvalde and from First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, where in 2017, 26 people were murdered and 22 more wounded by a gunman, help tell a horrific, bloody story.
Overall, it’s a stunning, heart-rending piece of journalism. It includes photos and quotes from witnesses, law enforcement and others connected to the mass shootings in Uvalde; Sutherland Springs; the Allen Premium Outlets shooting earlier this year; Parkland, Florida; Aurora, Colorado; and Newtown, Connecticut.
Please , please do not share the Washington Post. My daughter being taken from this world wasn’t fair to begin with, it’s not fair how she was taken either. Amerie, her classmates, & her teachers don’t deserve this.
— Kimberly Garcia (@kim_amerie) November 16, 2023
The pictures from Robb Elementary include some that are maddeningly similar to other crime scene photos we’ve seen from school shootings over the years. There are some with blood-smeared walls, floors, lockers and dry-erase boards. One is an image of a door with gaping, jagged-edge bullet holes.
One image stands out as the most startling of them all, breathtaking in its horror and simplicity. In that photo, more than a dozen body bags line both sides of the school’s hallway. The sterile white color of the body bags, countered with the lively green and blue of the school’s walls and vibrant bulletin boards, is nothing short of nauseating.
There have been hundreds of mass shootings in the United States in 2023. When it comes to the most deadly cases, an AR-15 rifle or an assault-style rifle is often the weapon of choice for the murderer. Guns and their impact and role in society is as polarizing and urgent a topic as there is in America today.
“[T]he full effects of the AR-15’s destructive force are rarely seen in public,” the article reads. “The impact is often shielded by laws and court rulings that keep crime scene photos and records secret. Journalists do not typically have access to the sites of shootings to document them. Even when photographs are available, news organizations generally do not publish them, out of concern about potentially dehumanizing victims or retraumatizing their families.”
Although the pictures published in the article are disturbing and gory in that there’s a great deal of visible blood, only one, taken during the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting in Las Vegas, shows dead bodies, but just slightly. The only dead children's bodies in any of the images are the ones inside those small white body bags. Garcia took to X again on Thursday morning after the story was published to restate her opposition.
“Please, please do not share the Washington Post,” the X post read. “My daughter being taken from this world wasn’t fair to begin with, it’s not fair how she was taken either. Amerie, her classmates, & her teachers don’t deserve this.”
In a piece that accompanied the Post’s American Icon story, Executive Editor Sally Buzbee expressed the goals of adding to the public’s understanding of the devastation AR-15s can cause and demonstrating sensitivity to those closest to the victims.
“I think most well-trained journalists have a belief that the public has a right to know.” – Dr. Rita Kirk, SMU professor
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“In the end, 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,” wrote Buzbee.
Buzbee’s piece highlights the fine line separating a sensationalistic stunt from a genuine attempt to serve the public. Dr. Rita Kirk, a professor of corporate communications and public affairs at SMU, sees what the Post was going for, but she doesn't fully buy into the reason it ran the article.
“I think most well-trained journalists have a belief that the public has a right to know,” Kirk told the Observer. “I think we’re all in agreement on that. I applaud the fact that the Post is taking this on as an issue to stop AR-15s. I admire that kind of deep commitment to making a public argument, but I don't think they’ve really looked much at the literature about what happens when you try to scare people out of behavior.”
Kirk added that if the Post’s goal is to stop shootings and to get guns off the streets, rather than to simply illuminate a tragic American problem, then it’s likely a losing battle. She doubts that anyone who owns an AR-15 will simply give them up as a result of seeing these pictures in a newspaper.
Dr. Kristie Bunton, dean of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at TCU, said the Post article succeeded in both the areas Buzbee detailed: shedding light on the inhumane impact of AR-15s and being respectful to the victims. A key factor for her is that the Post used this article to take a look back at many shootings over many years, not just the one in Uvalde, and after consulting with families of certain victims, elected not to run images of identifiable bodies.
“I think they are trying to achieve a balance to help the public understand that the AR-15 is implicated in the majority of these shootings over the past 20 years and that far too many people have died because of this assault weapon,” Bunton said. “I don't want to absolve the news’ responsibility of taking great care with these images, but my own belief is that the Washington Post has taken great care with these images. Of course, I can’t imagine what pain the mother who has spoken out on social media is going through and will go through for the rest of her life.”
