Picture This: Photos of Murdered Uvalde Kids on Instagram

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott enjoying life.

There’s a clamor to wake up Americans inured to the horror of murdered children by publishing pictures of some of the 19 kids shot to death Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas. 

It’s a strategy that has worked before to portray the cruelty of wholesale killing — in the American Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War and Ukraine.

It would probably be even more effective in this case. After all, it’s little kids.  

Do you doubt that there are people so cold to the deaths of children that they would need photographic evidence? Don’t. 

I was one of those people.

For a three-year period early in my newspaper career, I interviewed the parents of dead children almost every week.

Before long, I dreaded dealing with these distraught people. Too painful. But they all had good causes to promote, working to save the lives of other people’s children. It was hard to say No.

There were dozens of them. Most of them run together in my mind because I succeeded in forgetting. 

There’s one I can’t forget, however. It was because of something I saw. It wasn’t a corpse, but it was close. It haunts me to this day, decades later.

Every time I hear of the death of a child, I think of this husband and wife. 

The pair probably wasn't much different from any of the others. But they put me in fear of losing my own family before I even had one. 

My car had a flat tire the night I was to meet them, and the father gave me a ride from a gas station. On the way, we talked about the death of his little boy a few years before. 

Reading between the lines, I got the impression that as traumatic as that was, the man was ready to concentrate on the living members of his family. But his wife wanted a foundation in the boy’s name to raise money to cure what had ailed him, and the man supported her.

So every day, as they worked on the organization, the two revisited the nightmare of losing their only child.

The mother told me that she didn't want any more children. The foundation would be her family from that point forward. Her husband was silent.

As we talked in the front room, I felt like we were being watched. I finally asked what was propped on the stool near the door.

The woman said it was a life-sized doll fashioned at great expense to look as much as possible like her son at six. She said she couldn’t bear to go through a day without seeing him, and this way, she wouldn’t have to. She referred to the doll by the boy’s name. She touched it as she passed by.

The doll looked like a real boy except for the eyes, which stared vacantly in no particular direction.

A few years later, I called the couple to see how they were faring. The number was disconnected. Some friends told me the foundation and the marriage had failed.

I don’t find the woman's behavior odd. I understand that for all parents who lose children, there is a strong core of denial. The only difference with her was that she put it on display in her living room.

And because she did, I’ve never forgotten her or her anguish.

There are people in leadership roles, in Texas and elsewhere, who need to know just how awful it is to outlive a child. Instead of making sure as few people experience this as possible, we’re hearing excuses.

Gov. Greg Abbott and other Texas bigshots beat the drum of mental illness. There are people sick in the head who kill other people, they say. 

Of course, that’s true.

But Abbott’s state has a long way to go to fix the heads of its citizens. Depending on whom you ask, Texas is 48th or 49th in the nation on funding mental health.

Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz suggests one hardened entrance for every school. This is an expensive solution for a state that ranks 41st in public school spending.

Years ago, I talked to a receptionist at a wealthy Illinois district’s elementary school that was rebuilding its main entrance to try to keep the bad guys out. She noted that she and other office workers would be charged with checking identifications to decide who got in.

“They are putting me on the front line,” she said. 

It’s not easy. I was 25 miles away from such a hardened school once before I realized an office employee had given me the driver’s license of a handyman and handed him mine.

It didn't give me a lot of confidence in the school’s ironclad security.

Another suggestion is to station a cop or two, or security guards, in each school. Aside from the practical problem of the cop being elsewhere on the property when he’s needed at the door, there’s the reality of the situation: In Uvalde and elsewhere, cops have often been found to be very bad at stopping school killers. 

They’re excellent at searching backpacks for pot, however. 

There have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of gun laws passed in the United States over its history. You don’t hear about Tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns anymore, right? But we can’t do it anymore. No strong federal background checks, no red flags, no assault weapon bans. 

The U.S. banned assault rifles and big magazines in 1994. But when that law didn’t single-handedly stop the carnage in the 10 years of the ban’s life, Congress let it lapse. 

Ryan Busse, a former gun company executive, has been repeatedly quoted that “AR-15’s are a giant middle finger from the gun industry.”

He means that as long as the rifles, which he said are good only for killing human beings, are available, the industry and the NRA have won. And they rub it in the faces of everyone who disagrees.

So almost everybody who likes to play with military-style armament gets to do so. Crazy or not.

If they think they’ll be denied, they stamp their little feet. The noise is heard clearly in the halls of government, where opposing gun control brings electoral muscle and campaign funding.

That noise empowers an entire wing of the U.S. Senate. As long as that’s the case, the most unreasonable gun owners will get everything they want and innocent people will die for somebody else’s grotesque hobby.

Maybe photos of murdered children really should be posted on the Internet. If we’re the kind of people who allow such carnage, we should have to look at what we’ve done.

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