“Couldn’t have imagined saying this years ago, but it’s time - with the permission of a surviving parent - to show what a slaughtered 7-year-old looks like,” tweeted David Boardman, the former longtime executive editor of The Seattle Times who now runs Temple University’s journalism school. And I’ve covered so many of these.” With Tuesday’s killing of at least 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school coming on the heels of a mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket-and amid decades of recurring tragedies in Newtown, Parkland, and elsewhere-journalists and academics are questioning whether the traditional coverage model is adequately capturing the carnage, and even considering whether showing more graphic footage would force the public, and political leaders, to fully confront the sickening reality of America’s gun violence epidemic. I had a kindergartener during Sandy Hook. Indeed, as NPR national correspondent Sarah McCammon put it, “I was in high school when Columbine happened. And that has been the pattern, really, for at least two decades, going back to Columbine.” “The grief, the announcement, the outrage. The Texas Tribune’s staff has felt determined to aggressively cover this week’s horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, said editor in chief Sewell Chan, even as they are “exhausted that we have to cover this at all, exhausted that we have to cover this again, and resigned to taking part in what sometimes seems like a numb, meaningless ritual.” In newsrooms across America, a country where mass shootings have become a gruesome facet of daily life, the process has sadly become routine.

Columbine crime scene photos