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Travis's avatar

100% we should be showing the graphic images. The only way you get people off of their asses to do something is if they are confronted with images so horrible that it just instantly registers with them that shit like this needs to stop. It repulses them into action. We should have done this with CV too. Show the anti-vaxxers graphic video of other anti-vaxxers dying of oxygen loss in hospitals while saying goodbye to confused families via Skype. Because the Trumpers never had this reality shoved into their faces, they could ignore the horror. If you start shoving pictures of dead kids whose leg muscles and arm muscles are sheered off from the bullets basically vaporizing the muscle off of their body, they won't be able to look at AR-15s the same way again. If they see enough mutilated bodies of children, it will burrow into their minds and they will see those images every time they look at an AR-15. You're basically planting flashbacks into their mind in order to get them to be repulsed by the same items they are trying to defend.

My own experience with graphic images of children and never being able to see certain objects the same way again:

In October of 2005, we were setting up security barriers for the constitutional election in Barwana, Iraq. The KBR trucks who hauled the concrete barriers out from their cushy FOB at Al Assad air base couldn't fit their trucks through the town's narrow streets, so we had to offload them outside of town and haul them in a few at a time with forklifts that had escort humvees attached as they made their trips back and forth from the KBR trucks to the voting center inside of town. Once we had been static outside of the town guarding the KBR trucks for about 15 minutes, kids started coming out to ask the KBR drivers for candy while we were sitting there. A few moments later, mortar fire started landing next to the KBR trucks. Two kids were vaporized instantly, with only shoes being left behind by one of them. The other two kids were riddled with shrapnel and expired before the casevac helos landed at our position about 40 minutes later. I learned the price of democracy that day--having just turned 19 the month before, but I also earned one of my first flashbacks that would follow me for life. I cannot see a child's shoes to this day without mentally drifting off into disassociation land and going back to that moment.

Point being: the imagery of dead kids tied to imagery of assault rifles is a powerful psychological deterrent, if we're willing to use it. The GOP will howl foul play, but they will understand that they will lose that fight against that kind of imagery and the emotion it invokes.

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Gina Burton's avatar

We lost our son in a violent, unnatural way. I can only too vividly imagine the scene. If I actually saw him, I don’t think I’d be here now. That’s me. Other parents may feel differently. But please don’t leave those left behind out of this discussion. And give them each 2 votes to our 1.

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