How the news media visualized the Uvalde, Texas school shooting
Uvalde’s semi-weekly Leader-News went all black on its front page with just “May 24, 2022”
We now know an 18-year-old gunman walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, unobstructed on Tuesday and killed 19 kids and two teachers using an AR-15 as students called 911 for help and officers waited outside. One hour and 20 minutes elapsed between the first 911 call and law enforcement entering a classroom and killing the gunman. It’s the third deadliest campus shooting in recent U.S. history.
Uvalde’s semi-weekly Leader-News went all black on its front page with just “May 24, 2022” for their Thursday issue.
TIME’s new cover, by John Mavroudis, is a hand-drew list of every U.S. city that’s had a mass shooting this year, with Uvalde and Buffalo, N.Y., at the bottom near the coverline “Enough: When are we going to do something?” There have been 213 mass shootings in the U.S. this year so far.
It’s the third “Enough” cover TIME has done since April 2018, for its cover story on former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who organized March For Our Lives.
Mavroudis did the second “Enough” cover in Aug. 2019, writing the names of the 253 cities that had a shooting that year so far. He told TIME there were “so many familiar places to draw again” this time. “Chicago. Baltimore. Las Vegas. Louisville. Houston. Jacksonville. Stockton. And so many new places.”
Illustrator Brian Stauffer did the art for a Philadelphia Inquirer opinion piece on getting mad as hell about gun violence. On Instagram, Stauffer wrote, “DON’T LOOK AWAY. Stay angry. Act.”
The satire site Onion regularly publishes articles headlined “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” after mass shootings. On Wednesday, they repromoted all 21 versions of the article on their front page.
“It's just incredibly draining and it's hard to actually find like new angles on it," Onion editor-in-chief Chad Nackers told BuzzFeed News. "And this kind of encompasses everything and it just works so well and it captures the helplessness of it.
On Saturday, the Dallas Morning News and New York Times both published timestamps from the 911 calls. “Please send the police now,” a caller said during the sixth 911 call.
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This post was updated on May 27, 2022 with additional images, details, and examples.