Should we be forced to see exactly what an AR-15 does to a 10-year-old?

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I know that stoning people to death is barbaric. But I never understood just what it entails — the slow, cruel process by which a defenseless human being is degraded and destroyed — until I saw a series of photographs taken by Somali photojournalist Farah Abdi Warsameh, which depict the stoning execution of a man accused of adultery by the insurgent group Hizbul Islam. While some charge that viewing such pictures is voyeuristic, these images made me face the terror, the blood and the sheer cruelty of this practice — one that, astonishingly, has not yet been tossed into the dustbin of history.

Photographic images can bring us close to the experience of suffering — and, in particular, to the physical torment that violence creates — in ways that words do not. What does the destruction of a human being, of a human body — frail and vulnerable (all human bodies are frail and vulnerable) — look like? What can we know of another's suffering? Is such knowledge forbidden — or, alternately, necessary? And if we obtain it, what then?

These are questions that are being raised in the wake of last week's mass shooting of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, which has plunged much of the country into an abyss of sorrow, rage and despair. On social media and in the press, some, including the former homeland security chief Jeh Johnson, have suggested that photographs of the slaughtered children, whose faces and bodies were apparently mutilated beyond recognition, be released to the public in hopes of garnering support for gun control legislation.

Johnson called this an "Emmett Till moment," alluding to a photograph of the 14-year-old Black boy who was tortured and murdered by white racists in Mississippi in 1955. His mother had insisted on an open casket: Let the world — make the world — see what her son's tormentors had done. And the world did: The photograph of Till taken by Jet magazine was reproduced throughout the country and abroad and helped invigorate the civil rights movement.

The question of how much violence we should see, and to what end, is almost as old as photography itself. But the question gains urgency in our age of unfiltered immediacy — of the 24-hour news cycle, of Instagram and Twitter, of jihadi beheading videos, of fake news and conspiracy theorists and of repellent sites like BestGore, which revel in sadistic carnage. What responsibilities does the act of seeing entail? Is the viewing of violence an indefensible form of collaboration with it? Is the refusal to view violence an indefensible form of denial?

In the case of Uvalde, a serious case can be made — indeed, I agree with it — that the nation should see exactly how an assault rifle pulverizes the body of a 10-year-old, just as we needed to see (but rarely did) the injuries to our troops in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A violent society ought, at the very least, to regard its handiwork, however ugly, whether it be the toll on the men and women who fight in our name, on ordinary crime victims killed or wounded by guns or on children whose right to grow up has been sacrificed to the right to bear arms.

But seeing and doing are not the same, nor should they be. Images are slippery things, and it is both naïve and arrogant to assume that an image will be interpreted in only one way (that is, yours) and that it will lead to direct political change (the kind you support). Anti-abortion activists frequently wave images of fetuses at their rallies; these photos denote, to them, a nascent human being in need of protection. To abortion rights advocates, the image is sentimental, manipulative and, frankly, disgusting.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, Michael Moore wrote that he hoped photographs of the dead children would be leaked, perhaps by a grieving parent. If so, "the jig will be up" for the National Rifle Association, he confidently predicted. "The debate on gun control will come to an end. There will be nothing left to argue over."

This is childish thinking. Photographs tend to start arguments, not end them. And Moore could not have been more mistaken about the desires of the Sandy Hook parents. Partly in response, some of them pushed, successfully, for the passage of SB 1149, a Connecticut law that prohibits the disclosure of photographs and digital images of homicide victims. This raises another unresolved but increasingly exigent question: Do such photographs belong to the police, the FBI, the parents or the public? How to balance a family's right to privacy with the public's right to know?

There are many examples of photographs that gave history a nudge — sometimes even a vigorous one. Think of the My Lai massacre photographs, of the Abu Ghraib torture photos taken by American troops and of Darnella Frazier's phone video of George Floyd's murder. But just as the Till photograph didn't end Jim Crow, the My Lai images didn't end the Vietnam War (nor did press reports of the atrocity), the Abu Ghraib photographs didn't end the Iraq war (or even lead to high-level prosecutions), and the Floyd video didn't end police brutality. These photographs did support, encourage and strengthen public perceptions, political movements and public debates that were already in play. But none resulted in the kinds of immediate change that their supporters hoped for. When it comes to images, there are few Damascene moments, which is why most photojournalists are modest, if not pessimistic, about the influence of their work.

And viewers who look to photographs to effect political change should be careful what they wish for: Formulating political decisions on the basis of images can be treacherous. Photographs of skeletal Somalis dying of hunger — those by James Nachtwey are particularly brutal — were one of the key inspirations for the U.S.-United Nations intervention in Somalia in late 1992; less than one year later, Paul Watson's horrific photograph of a gleeful crowd dragging an American soldier's naked corpse contributed to our hasty retreat. (The Somali debacle was a major reason for the Clinton administration's refusal to respond to the Rwandan genocide the following year.)

In 2004, Khalid Mohammed's photograph of Iraqis in Falluja celebrating beneath the burned, mutilated bodies of American contractors hanging from a bridge resulted in what might be called the anti-Somalia effect: Rather than force a U.S. withdrawal, as some in the crowd had apparently hoped, the image encouraged an embarrassed President George W. Bush to order the Marine invasion of the city and intensify the war. The resulting battle was one of the longest and deadliest of the conflict. In its aftermath, one newspaper described Falluja as a "city of ghosts."

The most vexing political conflicts are the most resistant to photographic interventions — as the Syrian civil war, now in its 11th year, shows. Nilufer Demir's internationally disseminated photographs of little Aylan Kurdi, a drowned Syrian refugee who washed up on the shores of a Turkish beach, inspired fervent responses of outrage and promises of action in 2015. But outrage proved easier than action, and the plight of Syrian refugees remained pretty much the same.

And one might well wonder why the so-called Caesar images — a trove of 55,000 photographs depicting Syrians tortured to death in the prisons of President Bashar al-Assad — had zero political effect. The photographs, which were smuggled out of Syria in 2013 and depict victims of eye gouging, strangulation and starvation, were shown to the U.S. Congress, at the United Nations and to the secretary of state at the time, John Kerry, as well as other world leaders. Geoffrey Nice, a war crimes prosecutor, described them as akin to "getting the keys to the Nazi archive." However, as this newspaper reported, "Syrian's Photos Spur Outrage, but Not Action."

In the case of Uvalde, all of this remains, for the most part, theoretical. It is highly unlikely that the grieving parents would ever consent to the publication of images of their children and equally hard to imagine that the pictures would not circulate on sites that would dishonor, if not defile, the victims. Images of dead children, after all, are different from all others. Children represent both innocence and promise — represent, in fact, our belief in the future. To see them violated elicits instinctual reactions of pity, anger, grief and shame. The question, though, is what we do with that vortex of emotions once it has been unleashed.

Despite the very real dangers of exploitation and misuse that disclosure of the Uvalde photographs would pose, I myself would like politicians to view them: to look — really look — at the shattered face of what was previously a child and to then contemplate the bewildered terror of her last moments on earth. But that would not mean that the jig is up. People, not photographs, create political change, which is slow, difficult and unpredictable. Don't ask images to think, or to act, for you.

Susie Linfield teaches cultural journalism at New York University. She is the author of "The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence" and "The Lions' Den: Zionism and the Left From Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky." This article originally appeared in the New York Times.