WashPo Editorial on AR-15
Opinion
Don’t just be horrified. Ban AR-15s, bump stocks and large magazines.
By the Editorial Board
November 16, 2023 at 12:33 p.m. EST
Even the best-written accounts cannot fully convey the carnage of mass shootings. The frequency and lethality of massacres on U.S. soil numb society to the moral outrage of slaughtered innocents. The Post this year has documented the carnage created by the AR-15 in a series about the growing prominence of the assault rifle in American life. The latest installment, published Thursday, includes gut-wrenching images from some of the 11 crime scenes they looked at over the past 11 years, alongside quotes from eyewitnesses and first responders.
Each photograph, while disturbing, is worth more than a thousand words: Blood splattered underneath a backpack that says “Love Yourself” in an elementary school classroom. Body bags holding children fill the hallway. A sticker that says “choose joy” affixed to a school door that has been penetrated by a .223-caliber cartridge. A pulverized prayer book in a synagogue. Blood mixed with spilled popcorn in a movie theater.
A responsible newspaper does not publish such upsetting images lightly, but doing so showcases the destructive force of the AR-15 in a way words fail to do. Afraid of dehumanizing victims and retraumatizing families, editors have traditionally been more willing to publish grisly photos from faraway war zones than crime scenes at home.
Far too many politicians embrace stringent gun control only after a massacre hits home. The latest example came last month when Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) reversed his opposition to an assault weapons ban after 18 people were killed and 13 more wounded in his congressional district. Mr. Golden was one of five House Democrats to vote against such a ban when Congress narrowly passed one last year for the first time since 1994. (The Senate never considered the bill.) “I had the false confidence that our community was above this,” Mr. Golden said.
No community is safe from a determined shooter with an AR-15. The photographs published by The Post, which capture mundane places that became macabre, should shatter anyone’s false confidence that their church or kid’s school is different. The piece includes never-before-released pictures taken by law enforcement officers after shootings inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., in 2022. These feel hauntingly similar to pictures, also included with the piece, taken a decade earlier at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Border Patrol agent Travis Shrewsbury recalled to investigators that he noticed upon entering the classroom in Uvalde that it looked as if somebody had written LOL in blood on the whiteboard. Alexander Cuellar, another Border Patrol agent who responded to the scene, remembered “slipping and sliding” when he entered the classroom, trying not to fall because there was so much blood pooled on the floor. It’s one thing to read this. It’s another to see the puddles of blood.
The speed of its small and light bullet makes the AR-15 especially deadly, tearing apart organs. In March, The Post published 3D animations — based on a review of nearly 100 autopsy reports — to demonstrate why it’s harder to survive being shot with an AR-15 than a 9mm.
While a single bullet can kill instantly when it hits a vital organ, the newly published photographs also illustrate how many rounds have been fired during high-profile mass shootings. High-capacity magazines also enable mass killing. A picture from the Aurora movie theater massacre shows a drum magazine with 65 unspent rounds. An image from First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., where the gunman rapidly fired 450 rounds, shows a wall riddled with bullet holes and shell casings littering the floor. Another photograph shows a pile of guns in the Las Vegas hotel room of the man who killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more by firing on a music festival in 2017.
Bump stocks, which speed up how quickly bullets can be fired, enabled the shooter to fire over 1,000 rounds. This prompted then-President Donald Trump to sign an order directing the Justice Department to ban these devices. The Supreme Court announced this month that it will review a challenge to that order. The Biden administration argues that bump stocks fit the legal definition of machine guns, which have been banned since 1986, since they allow a shooter to fire hundreds of bullets a minute with a single pull of the trigger.
About 1 in 20 U.S. adults, roughly 16 million people, own at least one AR-15. Two-thirds of these were manufactured in the past decade. Just as there is no excuse for the widespread availability of these weapons of war, there is no legitimate purpose for civilians to be able to fire so many rounds with one pull of the trigger. The justices should uphold the Trump-era ban on bump stocks, but Congress should also show the courage to enact the common-sense restrictions into law.