People watch gory tv shows like the Walking Dead with their children. People flock to the internet, hunting for the latest mass-murderers’ videos so they can watch a massacre. But the media insists that showing the consequences of real-life violence is too disturbing.

Maybe our brains are confusing real life with “entertainment”. Maybe, our brains need to see real dead bodies in order to know the difference between entertainment and real life. Maybe, it’s time to start showing the dead bodies. Maybe its time, we looked.

If the 24-hour news had shown the tangled limbs of 20 six-year-old children lying dead on the floor, riddled with bullets and splattered with blood would people have felt differently about Sandy Hook? Would people have felt differently, if the cops had live cast the scenes of mass-murders? Would people have felt differently, if they’d watched police officers vomit, break down weeping or run away from these scenes? Would people have felt differently, if they’d watched first responders pick dead bodies off the floor, load them onto gurneys, and into vans, then unload them one by one into refrigerators at the morgue? Would people have felt differently, if they’d watched coroners dissect the bodies of the murdered and listened to them record their findings? Would people have felt differently, if they’d watched morticians stitch faces together, apply make-up, put clothes on limp bodies, and prepare the bodies for burial?

Would feeling different, make a difference? I think it would. If we saw the consequences of our decisions, maybe we’d spare ourselves and make different decisions. Maybe we’d start caring.