A picture can be worth a thousand terrible words

There was once a time when Florida did not require safety chains on towed vehicles. The inevitable happened one night in 1961 in Largo in Pinellas County. I was the reporter who got the call.

A boat trailer had slipped its hitch, struck an oncoming car, pierced the windshield and went into the back seat, where a young woman was sitting. She was so badly disfigured, it was as if she had been hit in the face by a cannonball.

My newspaper would never print such a photograph, but I took one because we had an agreement with the Florida Highway Patrol. If the FHP alerted us to wrecks, we would share photos, so we wound up taking many crime and accident scene pictures that were not published.

C.W. Bill Young, who would become Florida’s longest-serving member of Congress, was then a freshman state senator from Pinellas, where the accident happened.

He filed a bill to require safety chains, but rural lawmakers who ruled the state then did not like the government telling people what to do. To bolster his case, Young asked for the accident photos. We sent them, including one of that poor young woman, and safety chains became the law.

What I photographed haunts my memory 61 years later. It came to mind again reading about the Parkland mass murder trial.

The crime scene and autopsy pictures are so shocking that they were not shown on courtroom video monitors, as exhibits usually are. They were seen only by the judge, jurors, attorneys and a small media pool that was permitted to describe but not copy them.

Others need to see those pictures — specifically, those paragons of indifference in the Florida Legislature.

The Parkland autopsy photos show massive carnage caused by high-velocity rounds from the killer’s AR-15. In one case described by a medical examiner, a bullet that struck a student’s rib broke into “multiple fragments” that “perforated the lungs, liver, kidney” before exiting on the victim’s left side.

The weapon did exactly what it was designed to do with far greater muzzle velocity than traditional hunting rifles or other civilian firearms. It is meant to kill, to be lethal at 300 yards, and failing that, to inflict massive incapacitating damage that will keep its targets off the battlefield.

That seems beyond the comprehension of politicians, like those who run the Legislature, who continue to allow those assaulttype rifles to multiply in civilian hands, where they have become the weapons of choice for maniacal criminals.

It’s as if politicians can’t tell the difference between a weapon of mass destruction and a BB gun.

They might see it differently if they studied the crime scene and autopsy photos from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Four days after 14 students and three staff members died and 17 children were wounded, Heather Sher, a North Broward radiologist, wrote in The Atlantic about the CT scans. She had seen thousands of gunshot wounds, but these were different.

A handgun bullet, she wrote, “leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver … There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.”

This time, she wrote, a surgeon found “only shreds of the organ” that had been hit by one of the more than 100 rounds Nikolas Cruz had fired. “Nothing was left to repair — and utterly, devastatingly, nothing could be done to fix the problem.”

Nearly 400 million firearms are in use in this nation of 330 million people. It’s the developed world’s highest count per capita. Not surprisingly, we have the highest gun homicide rate.

Because a properly maintained firearm will last for generations, the manufacturing industry depends for new business on the notion that one isn’t enough and newer is better. Their propaganda has described AR-15s and the like as “modern sporting rifles.”

But Florida hunting regulators don’t see it that way. Their handbook prohibits all “center fire semi-automatic rifles having magazine capacities of more than five rounds.”

Florida gives game animals more of a sporting chance than school children or nightclub patrons. Assault-type weapons typically accommodate 30-round magazines. Cruz took 10-round magazines to the high school.

After Parkland, the Legislature was unable to do anything about assault-style weapons except forbid sales of rifles to people under 21 who were already barred from buying handguns. Even that modest step was too much for the gun lobby, which is fighting the law in court.

A federal law that banned assault weapons for 10 years was allowed to lapse in 2004. The NRA claimed it hadn’t worked, but it had. The Senate Judiciary Committee reported that mass shootings of six or more people had declined 37% during that time and rose by 183% in the decade after.

Would horrifying photographs make a difference in Tallahassee? Perhaps not.

But it’s worth a try. After all, it worked 61 years ago.