One More Thing Musing

We've been getting complaints all day about the picture that we (and at least two dozen other newspapers) chose to use as our lead art about the shootings: that it was too violently graphic, that it was too physically graphic, that they don't want their children to see such things, that we are incredibly insensitive to be using such a photo in our newspaper.

What would you morons prefer for such a horrific day? Pictures of daisies? Shiny, happy people?

So let's get this addressed and out of my system ...

1. The gore content is too graphic/he's dead; how dare we show a dead body in our paper

Considering the bloodbath that was going on, the little bit of blood smeared on the guy's legs and torso was minimal -- incredibly minimal -- to what could have been seen in, say, a blood-spattered classroom, on a corpse, pooled under a window ... People bleed when they're shot. It's a simple fact.

And he's not dead -- the nature of the rescue personnel rushing him across the campus speaks to that. Were he dead, well, they wouldn't be hurrying.

Besides that, how two-faced of you to complain about a dead body being shown for this story when you don't say a peep about the pictures of bodies elsewhere in the world. Is it less horrific to you that a child could be killed by a bomb in Iraq or that a family could be grieving over the body of their son in Israel?

2. It's too physically graphic (we can see his anatomy)

People -- it's a tourniquet hanging between his legs. The same tourniquet that you can see wrapped around his leg. Perverts. The kid was shot, remember?

3. We don't want our kids to see these kinds of things

Really? I'll bet you let your kid go to movies that portray violence. You probably let your kid watch "24" with you. You probably let your kid listen to music with violent lyrics.

But forgive me -- you don't want your kid to know what's actually going on in the world. That's too violent. As long as someone scripted the violence, it's fine. I hear the shooter at Virginia Tech wrote some pretty violent stories and plays. Maybe you would have let your kid go watch one of his screenplays.