Documentary film maker Michael Moore wants to “finish off the NRA.” You know, metaphorically. ‘Cause the “gun lobby” is all that stands between Mr. Moore’s desire for civilian disarmament and civilian disarmament. To that end, he wants the Connecticut police to release photos of the dead children shot at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown . . .
When the American people see what bullets from an assault rifle fired at close range do to a little child’s body, that’s the day the jig will be up for the NRA. It will be the day the debate on gun control will come to an end. There will be nothing left to argue over. It will just be over. And every sane American will demand action.
Yeah, who needs debate? Who needs perspective? Let’s decide public policy on the basis of pure, unadulterated, uninformed emotion. And because Mr. Moore can’t wait for that triumphant moment, his blog asks readers to imagine it.
Dr. Cyril Wecht, past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, told me this:
The kind of ammunition used by the Newtown killer would have produced very extensive, severe and mutilating injuries of the head and face in these small victims. Depending on the number of shots striking a child’s head, substantial portions of the head would be literally blasted away. The underlying brain tissue would be extensively lacerated with portions of hemorrhagic brain tissue protruding through the fractured calvarium and basilar skull, some of which would remain on portions of the face…actual physical identification of each child would have been extremely difficult, and in many instances impossible, even by the parents of any particular child.
We also know this, according to Dr. Wecht:
In one case, the parents have commented publicly upon the damage to their child, reporting that his chin and left hand were missing. Most probably, this child had brought his hand up to his face in shock and for protection and had the hand blasted away along with the lower part of his face.
According to Mr. Moore, this is your fault. Well, our fault. Because we did “nothing” after the Columbine killing to prevent Adam Lanza—or evil loons like Lanza (my words)—from unleashing his murderous mayhem. We need to see what we—yes we—have done.
But I am telling you now, that moment will come with the Newtown photos – and you will have to look. You will have to look at who and what we are, and what we’ve allowed to happen. At the end of World War II, General Eisenhower ordered that thousands of German civilians be forced to march through the concentration camps so they could witness what was happening just down the road from them during the years that they turned their gaze away, or didn’t ask, or didn’t do anything to stop the murder of millions.
Comparing the Sandy Hook spree killing to the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of defenseless children and millions of innocent adults is flat-out ridiculous and not a little insensitive. Suggesting that Americans who voted for politicians who defend their Constitutionally protected right to armed self-defense are culpable for Lanza’s killing spree is insane.
Crazy like a fox, of course. Moore reckons the same kind of “white guilt” that fueled the civil rights movement—assuming that’s a valid assertion—would undermine the influence of gun rights advocates and their standard bearer, the NRA. In this, I don’t think he’s wrong. Which means the opposite is also true. Well, almost.
Photos or film from the Nazi death camps [such as the ones featured in this British film deemed too gruesome for the general public at the time] wouldn’t convince 2A fence straddlers to develop an appreciation for their gun rights. Too depressing. Too . . . incomprehensible. “It couldn’t happen here.”
In the same sense, terrible images of mutilated Sandy Hook victims would not “convert” Americans to the anti-gun side. They’d harden both “sides” of the “debate.” Gun control advocates would be “inspired.” Gun rights advocates would say, see? This is what we must arm ourselves against.
Yes, someday a Sandy Hook mother – or a Columbine mother, or an Aurora mother, or a mother from massacres yet to come – will say, like the mother of Emmett Till, “I just want the world to see.” And then nothing about guns in this country will ever be the same again.
Pack your bags, NRA – you’re about to be shown the door. Because we refuse to let another child die in this manner. Got it? I hope so.
All you can do now is hope no one releases those photos.
We who cherish our Constitutionally protected right to self-defense have nothing to fear from agit-prop agitators like Mr. Moore. We know the truth hurts. It liberates you from comfortable illusions. Like the idea that gun control can stop madmen from carrying out their evil intentions.