If children are being slaughtered, if a father is carrying his dead daughter through a bombed-out street, or if there is footage of dead children in southern Israel, which, for now, seems to have been shown mostly in a selective way through screenings by the Israel Defense Forces, the world, at large, should see that. If the parents are willing, and believe that their child’s death can spark the outrage needed to produce an outcome that would stop or reduce these mass shootings, should we see these dead children in the same way that we have seen the dead children of Gaza? One does not have to agree upon what the solution might be-gun control or early psychiatric interventions or whatever else-to understand the calculation here. In an excellent column in the New York Times about a photograph of six dead children in Gaza, Lydia Polgreen writes, “The news media no longer needs to disseminate an image for it to be seen. Social media bludgeons us with a flood of brutal images.” Polgreen points to a discomforting probability: when the world ultimately sees the images of dead children in a school shooting in the United States, it will likely come via social media and be taken by someone who was inside the school, or, perhaps more ghoulishly, the shooters themselves.

Source: The Dead Children We Must See

I don’t like thinking about this, but neither does anyone else. And yet, we need to make it better somehow.