The Tucson Shootings: Words and Deeds

The night of the mass shooting in Tucson, a downtown art gallery hosted an already scheduled reception for an exhibition, Flesh · Bone · Spirit. The images on display from François Robert’s photography series Stop the Violence were of human bones arranged in the shapes of a handgun, grenade, knife, Kalashnikov, fighter jet, and other symbols of violence, all starkly set on black backgrounds. Those images confronted viewers with their own heavy feelings. That morning six people had been killed and thirteen wounded in the shooting rampage at Gabrielle Giffords’s political rally at a local Safeway. Jared Lee Loughner had tried to assassinate the Arizona congresswoman, using a Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol and firing thirty-one rounds into the crowd in about fifteen seconds.