Parkland jurors can’t avert their eyes from the AR-15’s carnage. Maybe none of us should | Editorial

Nikolas Cruz bought the AR-15 that he used to kill 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School because it was “cool-looking.” That’s what he told a Broward Sheriff’s detective, according to court documents.

It was cool-looking.

Cruz’s trial isn’t over yet. The prosecution has rested, and the defense is making its case against the death penalty, after his guilty plea. But even as the jury continues its heartbreaking job, one so agonizing it would be beyond the endurance of many, the AR-15-style gun marketed as “America’s rifle” continues to plague us all.

Cruz chose the same style of weapon as the shooter in Uvalde, the one in Las Vegas, the one at Pulse in Orlando, the one at Sandy Hook, the one in Buffalo, the one in Highland Park, Illinois. These are guns that trace their roots to the Vietnam War. They’re designed to kill lots of people and to look pretty much the same as ones used in the military.

It makes us numb, that list of shootings. But how many of us would still feel that way — could still feel that way — if we’d seen what the jurors in the Cruz trial have had to see? They don’t have the luxury of averting their eyes from the carnage. They can’t duck from the reality of what this country allows: Cruz purchased his weapon legally.

That has to change.

The graphic photos of human beings’ destruction — the tiny entrance wound, the gaping, obscene exit wound — were shielded from the public, considered too awful for most of us to contemplate. But the jurors deciding Cruz’s fate had to see them. Reporters covering the case also viewed them, including David Ovalle.

Ovalle is the Miami Herald’s veteran court reporter. He’s seen some of the worst things that humans can do to each other. But even he struggled to comprehend the horrific damage depicted in the photos.

“For me, the exit wounds were so jarring to view,” he said. “It’s hard to even describe them, because the descriptions of gaping wounds, ragged flesh and deep-red-colored holes just don’t do enough to convey the devastation caused by these weapons of war.”

He talked about one boy, shot eight times, with exit wounds on his forearm — “a massive hole of ragged flesh” — and one of his legs. And about a girl, lying on the floor in front of a classroom lectern, “her eyes wide open as if she’s in pain, her mouth slightly open.” The side of her head is missing, her brain pulverized by a high-velocity bullet.

None of us should have to know about the damage that high-velocity bullets can do. And yet, as the shootings continue, so many of us do.

‘Snowstorm’ of damage

Medical examiners have offered more grim lessons during this trial. They told jurors that the bullets that AR-15-style weapons use are created to inflict massive internal damage. Forensic pathologists testified about how the bullets tore through flesh and hit bone, creating a “snow storm” of bullet fragments peppering the person’s insides, often fatally.

As former Broward chief medical examiner Craig Mallak described it, “It’s a very small bullet, but it’s moving at 3,000 feet per second. There’s so much energy with these bullets. It just tears skin, bones, organs.” It’s a path 20 times to 30 times the size of the actual bullet, he said.

He performed the autopsy on 14-year-old Cara Loughran, who suffered three wounds: one small entry wound to the left upper back and two gaping exit wounds in the upper chest.

One bullet entered the rib area of 14-year-old Alaina Petty. “After that, the bullet was fragmented into multiple fragments that perforated the lungs, liver, kidney and exits on the left lateral side of the torso,” Associate Medical Examiner Iouri Boiko testified.

Meadow Pollack’s wounds were catastrophic. The 18-year-old was shot seven times, one fracturing her spine. A bullet that grazed her opened a five-inch gash on her skull. It wasn’t a direct hit. But the energy of the bullet was so powerful, she had no chance.

Marketing works

This style of weapon isn’t popular by accident — it’s marketing. The Washington Post recently published a story outlining how one of the manufacturers of AR-15-style rifles tried to run an ad during the Super Bowl, knowing the NFL would probably reject it but ready to launch accusations of censorship and hypocrisy. The ad was rejected. And the counterattack was “by far” the most successful marketing the company had ever had, one company exec said.

The United States banned assault weapons before, from 1994 until 2004. In that 10-year period, mass-shooting deaths were reduced, according to at least one study, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. In July, the House passed new assault-weapons ban legislation, largely along party lines. It’s unlikely to advance in the evenly split Senate, but at least it is some recognition that the Second Amendment doesn’t confer unlimited rights.

And there is support from the White House. President Biden, in a Pennsylvania speech on safer communities and gun control Tuesday, said the county “is awash in weapons of war.” Parents whose children died in the Uvalde shooting, he said, had to supply DNA for identification, “because the AR-15 just rips the body apart.”

Still-life horror

Jurors in the Parkland case are doing what no one should have to do. Instead of shielding themselves from the dreadfulness of this mass shooting, they have to immerse themselves in it. They’ve listened to the anguished parents, siblings and friends. They’ve visited the still-life horror of Building 12 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, preserved since 2018 for the trial: dried pools of blood on the floor, overturned chairs, discarded headphones, a chess game still in the middle of play, broken glass that still crunches underfoot.

And they’ve seen those photos, the nightmarish pictures of slaughter four years ago on Valentine’s Day committed by someone who thought an AR-15 looked “cool.”

There have been so many shootings. We try to preserve our own sanity by turning away, afraid of having those images of blood and terror and viciousness branded into our consciousness forever.

But maybe we shouldn’t turn away. Maybe if all of us, including our elected officials, had to see those photos, pictures out of our worst nightmares, we could build some kind of consensus, again, on something that seems so simple it shouldn’t need saying: Weapons of war have no place in a civilized society.