http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2023/05/187-school-shootings.html
#187 Blog Post - Tuesday, 2 May 2023
Posted by Denny Hatch
A Direct Marketer Takes Aim at the Gun Lobby
With a Sincere Attempt to "Save the Children."
This photograph is typical of how Congress, local politicians, guns and ammo manufacturers, the NRA, gun owners and the media want Americans to believe what classroom shootings are really like.
The sanitized message of the Gun Lobby: The dead children are in a happy place — in heaven playing with stuffed Teddy bears hugging little bunny rabbits among colorful flowers. All are having a loving and lovely time together.
The Backgrounder That Triggered
This Long Overdue Blog Post.
This past March 27th a nutcase woman wielding two AR-15 automatic rifles and a pistol shot her way into the Covenant Presbyterian Elementary School in Memphis. After walking the halls she found three 9-year-old children and three adult teachers and blew them to smithereens. Mercifully, the police rushed in and shot her dead before she could take any more lives.
This was the 118th school shooting incident in the first three months of 2023. That’s more than one shooting every day.
2023
School Shooting Victims Numbers 68-73
Evelyn Dieckhaus (age 9) Hallie Scruggs (age 9) William Kinney (age 9)
Katherine Koonce (age 60) Mike Hill (age 61) Cynthia Peak (age 61)
Why
Should This Cranky Marketing Blog
Give
a Damn About School Shootings?
Our business — yours and mine — is direct marketing.
We dream up products and services, figure out the precise arithmetic and then create selling campaigns that will bring in the most orders hopefully at the allowable CPO (cost-per-order).
After 60 years in direct marketing I have come up with the seven-word description of what we do:
“We create wants and change people’s behavior.”
If we are the foremost experts at changing behavior, how’s about we change the behavior of the rogue members of America's AR-15 sicko sub-culture addicted to performing mass murders.
The Five Enablers That Must Change Their
Behavior to Put an End to Gun Violence.
1. Congress, State and Local Politicians
2. NRA
3. Guns and Ammo Manufacturers
4. Gun Owners
5. The Media
Of the Five Groups Above, Only the Media —
The Lynchpins — Have Gone Unchallenged
I spent a week wrestling with the question: Why aren’t all Americans against mass shootings? What is the missing link?
Then it hit me. Hard. I had
never seen a photograph of a crime scene — the actual schoolroom where a shooting massacre had just taken place:
• The mayhem of mutilated
dead little kids with their heads blown off by a military AR-15 assault rifle.
• Their bloodied brains splattered on the walls and windows with their tiny bodies lying soaked
in pools of blood — bright red blood everywhere.
• The limited number of people who have seen firsthand the real horror of mass shootings are the perps, teachers, police, EMTs, local mayors and pols, the janitors who cleaned the mess up and the traumatized little classmates lucky enough not to have been in the line of fire.
I searched all over Google, Bing , the Internet, YouTube et al., for a photo of an actual schoolroom mass murder crime scene. Couldn’t find one, not in color, not in black-and-white, not movies, not stills. Zip. Zero. Nada.
Two Appalling Crimes That Were
Graphically Pictured in My Lifetime
My family followed World War II more closely than most Americans. The reason: my father, Alden Hatch, had written the first biography of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, published in late December 1944 while the war was still raging. On April 12, 1945, General Ike flew into Ohrdruf, Germany to meet with Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley for a tour of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp system where 56,545 prisoners — men, women and children were starved, tortured and executed. The three American generals and their staffs, who had heard rumors of the cruelty, carnage and death, were seeing it firsthand for the first time.
“In a shed, a pile of roughly 30 emaciated bodies were discovered, sprinkled with lime in an attempt to cover the smell. Patton, a man privy to the violent scenes of war, refused to enter this shed as the sights and smells in the camp had previously caused him to vomit against the side of a building.” —National World War II Museum, New Orleans, Louisiana
Eisenhower sent members of his staff to interview the well-fed, German citizens that lived in the towns around the camps and were hostile to their American conquerors. How could they have stomached what was going on? the American military wanted to know. “We didn’t know anything about it,” the Germans lied.
Eisenhower ordered they tour the camp. Here's the video. I invite you to have a look.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SUXTq47mmc&t=5s
Fast Forward to August 1955.
Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. He was accused by a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, of offending her with a wolf whistle in the back room of her family’s grocery store. Four days later Till was lynched by Bryant’s husband and half-brother, tortured, beaten and murdered.
“Till's body was returned to Chicago, where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket, which was held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ.[4] It was later said that "The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley[a] exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till's bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention on not only American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy".[5]
"Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and images of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the lack of black civil rights in Mississippi, with newspapers around the U.S. critical of the state. Although local newspapers and law enforcement officials initially decried the violence against Till and called for justice, they responded to national criticism by defending Mississippians, temporarily giving support to the killers. In September 1955, an all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty of Till's murder.” —Wikipedia
Takeaways to Consider
• For Emmett's funeral, in Chicago, Mamie Till insisted that the casket containing his body be left open, because, in her words, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby." That photograph changed American history.
• The American media establishment — TV, radio, Internet, blogs, e-newsletters, social media, newspapers, magazines, movies, billboards and skywriting — reach directly into the lives of the entire U.S. population, currently 337 millions of us.
• Alas, no member of this vast network will ever show the actual crime scene of a modern-day mass schoolroom shooting. The reason: it would “offend.” (And be poor P.R. for the "greatest country in the history of mankind.")
• Remember Rupert Murdoch’s immortal quote: “It’s not red; it’s not blue; it's green." It's about money. (In this case it's about cancelled advertising and canceled subscription revenues.)
• The horrifying portrait of Emmett Till in death was a one-off event. A roomful of disfigured dead children with bright red blood all over the place is not in the cards.
• As a result, the greedy $2.2 trillion-dollar Media Establishment — with tentacles that reach throughout the entire country — will remain the root of all this evil. It is the ultimate enabler of America’s AR-15 culture, wielding far more power than Congress, NRA and the guns-and-ammo makers combined.
• “Viewer discretion is advised.”
• If you have a better idea, let's hear it!
Thank you.
DH:dh
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Hi Denny -- I have no doubt that publicizing the gory photos will have an effect. What you have to remember though are the feelings of the family and friends of the victims. In most cases, they will not want these photos exposed in the media. There's also the effect these pictures would have on children who view them. Those are probably the main reasons we don't allow it in Israel. In the case of Emmett Till, his mother actually wanted the photo publicized, I'm sure a very difficult decision.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, as a vegan, I would like to see scenes from inside slaughterhouses given wide publicity, so people can see where their hamburger and lamb chops come from. I'm sure that would cause a lot more people to become vegetarians. Alas, we are up against the huge meat and dairy industries, big, big dollar advertisers, so this is not likely to happen.
Hey Doug,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your splendid comment!
I received several emails from readers pointing out the personal devastation bereaved families and surviving children who would relive experience for years (indeed forever) following the horror of a random killing spree. I am guilty of not thinking through the entire premise.
It’s imperative there be a graphic photo of a crime scene. It need not be an actual crime scene with an actual classroom and identifiable victims. Instead, let’s create a shockingly realistic stage set of a mass murder scene using a tableau imagined by a team of world class theatrical/motion picture special effects designers, costumers, makeup artists and modelers who would recreate the gore and horror of a mass shooting. No identifiable faces would be seen of children or adults. All would be disfigured, with blood brains and gore all over the place. The general scene would be horrific and totally anonymous.
I would suggest 99 full color photographs of the entire room from all angles plus close-ups of anonymous victims — adults, children and perhaps an animal or two plus a smashed aquarium with dead fish covered in human blood (It’s “Bring you pet to school day!”)
Financing: I envision raising money for a 501(c)(3)tax exempt organization to pay for the entire project with the copyright immediately consigned to the Public Domain. Anybody can use it. Nobody pays royalties. If money is left over, we can do a mass-murder scene of the year. Every year, so the public realizes this is not a one-off problem. If the entire tableaux or close up from the tableaux are used for a book jacket or magazine cover, tante mieux.
P.S. Regarding animal slaughterhouses and abattoirs (which also horrify me), let’s consider the possibility of our 501(c)(3) project centered on humans having a sister organization that does likewise for animals.
Thank you again, Doug.
—DH