I’m an FSU student. As some of you may already be aware, there was a shooting on campus today. Two people are dead and six others are in the hospital right now because a 20 year old took mommy’s gun and decided to ruin lives. The second worst thing to happen today resulted from the people who took it upon themselves to circulate images of the aftermath. One video in particular showed a girl bleeding out on the lawn, motionless and very clearly in need of help, while the person recording just kept walking and casually sipping her Starbucks.
Like WHAT THE FUCK? Is it that hard to be a decent human fucking being and at the very least NOT record/post the victims who were shot? Let alone in such a blasé manner? I’m sick to my stomach. I couldn’t imagine if one of my friends got hurt today and a shithead’s Facebook post was how I found out. That’s someone’s daughter, sister, loved one. How dare she be treated with such blatant disrespect. Today was the most horrible day of someone’s life and there are really wastes of space out here exploiting that for a scrap of clout. I’ve lost yet another chunk of my faith in humanity.
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Merika.
I was gonna come in with some nuance about how/when we see traumatic images hit fuck all that this is hideous and joke of that applies.
I’m sorry for what y’all are going through, and i’m sorry people are being so fucking casual about it. Take carr of yourself
You know what? I now disagree. Our society needs to see what this looks like. Everyone has become so jaded.
Maybe seeing these horrendous acts of evil will finally make Americans wake the f*ck up and realize what these weapons of mass destruction do.
Enough is enough.
So. I get this. I totally hear you on this, and most of me wholeheartedly agrees with the sentiment. Seeing shit like this is traumatizing, galling, scarring, and victims and the family and friends of victims will inevitably wind up being retraumatized by seeing images like this circulating. Worse, there are people in the world who actively search out shock gore and fetishize the victims and enjoy stimulating their senses watching and seeing this.
Without going into too much detail, I worked in a job where I was principal point of contact for footage like this and involved me trying to actively scrub footage to sterilize it for people farther down the food chain. Blurring, deleting, censoring, etc. for media purposes. That car crash didn’t have the white sheet over the accident vehicle yet, that fentanyl victim being narcanned and getting chest compressions needs their face blurred, etc.
I’d like to offer a different perspective.
There’s a massive and seemingly irredeemable gun violence problem in the States, and the victims and their families will, likely, NEVER see any “benefit” of change for what they’ve gone through. Something needs to change. The powers that be have effectively and resolutely sterilized the problem, and that problem is the swathe of bodies that follow a shooting. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think anybody knows what the answer is. In my down moments, and having seen the worst of the worst, I know I drive more carefully, I know I carry narcan with me to help someone else, I know I’m always slow to escalate a situation, and I know I keep my firearms safe, secured, and accessible only to myself after a LOT of inconvenience to so much as take them out of their storage (granted, I’m Canadian, so the types of weapons we even legally have access to are nowhere near the destructive monsters available freely in the US).
The faces of the victims haven’t helped. The stories of their families and the survivors haven’t helped. The execution or life imprisonment of the killers hasn’t helped.
When the moral high ground and pleas to fix things hasn’t helped, I wonder often if shock and disgust would help. I don’t think so, frankly. I think America as a reasoned country is as dead and buried as Lisa McCully, James Cho, Katherine Massey are.
Maybe parading the guts and holes to Mom and Pop Henderson is the prescription. I don’t know if I’d want to be the one to do it. I think that step is one that would be impossible to come back from. I can’t think of a family that would want to allow that for their family member, either, which is obviously the end of the conversation.
I’m just tired, and cynical. I don’t know what it will take to change minds. I wish I did.
I know if some shitbird blew my brains all over the pavement while I was drinking a coffee at the mall, I’d want what’s left of me spammed over God’s green in the hope it created change. ESPECIALLY to the people that choose to actively ignore and throw obstacles in the way of reform. Make them say it to what’s left of me. But, again. I’m tired, fed up, and cynical.
I’m sorry this happened to you and your school, and I’m sorry people are in it for clicks. I’m also sorry you won’t be the last, and the people who could change it won’t.
I hope you’re able to heal. I wish you kindness, and I hope your future is less cynical than mine.