||| FROM JAMES SCHEIB |||


Our people don’t know, in their souls, the true cost of violence because they don’t see the bodies. People come apart when hit with military or big game hunting grade small arms bullets. The description in literature, “people were shot to pieces,” is accurate.

I’m 84 years old and can still see the bodies, in my mind, of Marines and V.C. after fire fights that took place in the late 1960s. To help force an end to the Viet Nam conflict, the media displayed the bodies, often in color. That worked.

If we want to change people’s minds about the mass killing of babies, children and adults, the brutality must be brought home with vivid and indelible images. Fear of offending people is allowing carnage to continue. All of our “trigger time” veterans know it. The doctors, nurses, first responders and funeral directors who deal with the cost of violence know it. Even if they are trained to deal with it, it costs them in their souls.

The cost of violence is not an abstraction or a statistic. The media needs to get real again.


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