Required reading: what bullets do to bodies

There’s a line in this Atlantic piece from a former Rocky Mountain News editor who, while reflecting on what it was like to cover the Columbine shootings in 1999, says, “The only thing holding us back from getting on the streets quickly was that the pictures we were getting from our photographers on the scene were so bloody, we didn’t feel we could put them on the front page.”

And it reminded us of this truly astonishing piece, What Bullets Do To Bodies, from HuffPost Highline back in 2017. It’s partly a profile of a longtime trauma surgeon in Philadelphia, but more so an exploration of “what surgeons know about gun violence that the rest of us don’t”...and it raises a chilling question amidst all the usual media hand-wringing about how to cover gun violence correctly: in not publishing photos that capture the true extent of the horror...are we accidentally sanitizing it?