What happened on Wednesday morning at 6: 45 a.m. at Bridgewater Plaza, Roanoke, Virginia, was not ‘just another shooting.’ 24-year-old Alison Parker and 27-year-old Adam Ward were fatally shot while doing their jobs as professional journalists. An hour into the story, news reports came out with the name of the shooter as Bryce Williams; my instant reaction was to quickly access his twitter account.
‘Heart wrenching’ is an understatement for all the emotions I went through while reading his tweets and watching the videos he shared of the incident himself. It was chilling in every aspect. I couldn’t believe two people from my fraternity were taken down in such a way, especially on live tv. The pictures were gruesome.
Quickly, media organizations had to make a decision to show or not show the footage. CNN went through with showing the footage once every hour and Buzzfeed made the video public as well. Most other news organizations refrained from showing it. There are two issues here. One, how do you decide as a journalist whether or not to filter information that you have access to? Will making it available to your viewers cause any harm? Isn’t it mistrust if you do not tell or show what you know or are in possession of?
The other dimension to the shooting is the issue on gun control; it is time to ask the tough questions. We can’t keep mourning the deaths inflicted by shootings and then do nothing about the source of the problem.
The question everybody is asking is how many more America? how many more have to die for us to begin talking about guns and make it stricter and more difficult for people like Bryce Williams to get access to a gun? We must stop looking away and start looking at the issues concerning gun control.
The National Rifle Association is a stakeholder. Citizens, gun advocates, gun control advocates must sit on opposite sides of the table and try to avoid the next shooting in the United States. It is possible America, if not you than whom? The country that gave the world the values of liberty, freedom, secularism, democracy. The country that gave the world science and technology, put humans in space, on the moon, can’t that country come as one and stop the next burglary of life from a dacoit called the gun? You certainly can America, you got this.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said, “We’ve got, in America, we’ve got to come together, there’s too much gun violence in the United States of America.”
In public policy terms, the closest we’v come to passing something on gun control and background checks followed the Sandy Hook school shooting when many people called for a debate and for action to be taken on gun violence. The bill unfortunately failed in the Senate at the time.
Alison Parker’s father spoke to Megyn Kelly from Fox News later that night. “We’ve got to do something about crazy people getting guns,” Parker said. “My mission in life is I’m going to do something to shame legislatures into doing something about closing loopholes and background checks and making sure crazy people don’t get guns.”
Maybe this article will be tarnished as ‘crap written by a foreigner’, but the world needs America to take action, my friends. If George Washington and other founding fathers in the mid-1700s had shied away from talking about democracy, we would never have been a free nation. You defeated the British navy when you didn’t have a navy, you freed yourself from an aggressor twice the size of you, you are great, nobody is questioning that, but now it is time to display your greatness once again for your people. Let’s debate, America. Let’s debate why an American on a recurring basis has to lose his or her life to a gunfire. Why have more Americans died by gun shots than at wars? Why?
Rest in peace Alison and Adam. You were two seemingly beautiful journalists who deserved much better. At the end of the day, you were only doing your job of telling a story. I would like to end this with a quote from Henry Grunwald that has been a major influence in my work, “Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.”
