Multiple deaths, including children, at Connecticut school shooting

They should be saved for people who thought the entire thing was a hoax.

 

I'm pretty sure Afghanistan doesn't have much to do with Newtown. Can we not get this locked again, please?

 

I'd be interested to see the photos.

 

Of dead children?

 

Yeah. It's part of the story.

 

That's pretty ghoulish of you.

Photos were a part of Adam Walsh's murder, too. Doesn't mean I'd want to see a photo of his decapitated body.

 

It's not that kind of interest, though. I don't want to gawk at them or anything. And I wouldn't particularly enjoy seeing them. But I think crime scene photos are very effective at driving home what actually happened. I watched the West Memphis 3 documentary on HBO last year, and I thought that the crime scene photos/footage shown very early on was really what forged my connection to the events. It wasn't just escapism for me. Real kids died.

 

Yeah. 20 of them. Horrifically. I know it happened. I don't need to see closeups of a 6-year-old's brain matter.

Maybe that's just me.

 

I am a bit suprised and do have to ask if you really want to see them or just figure this is the taking of the intellectual exercise to the nth degree.

 

I guess it depends on the person.

I'm a mass of contradictions when it comes to this. We had a closed casket at my dad's wake. Although I was in the room when he actually died - an absolutely searing experience - I did not go into the room before the service, when it was opened for his brothers to view in private. They took pictures of him, which I thought was completely bizarre. But they did it at my aunt's wake, too. (Supposedly it's a Southern thing.)

 

Iron, more of an emotional experience than an intellectual one. I don't think it's accurate to say I "want" to see them. I don't. But, among other reasons, I feel like I have a duty as a citizen to face the grim reality. And, as a human being, I am curious about the emotion seeing them would trigger. And the connection. We talked about a New Yorker piece about Newtown on the Journalism Topics board, and I noted how hard it hit me when there was a single line about a father viewing his dead boy's body with a single bullet wound in his forehead. That drove what happened home to me in a way none of the news coverage had to that point. I'm willing to venture that photos would do so even more. The vagaries and generalities that events like this get reported in sometimes can make me feel very disconnected from the events and their consequences.

I think I also always have in my mind the fact that Emmett Till's mother demanded an open casket at his funeral, because she felt that was the only way people could actually understand the horror of what he went through.

 

@ Dick, fair point and I can understand it intellectually, just can't reconcile it emotionally.