The Top 5 Longreads of the WeekThis week, our Top 5 sets an important and particularly sobering prec

The Top 5 Longreads of the WeekThis week, our Top 5 sets an important and particularly sobering precedent. In the April 28th, 2017 edition of the Top 5, Jason Fagone’s extraordinary Huffpost Highline piece, “What Bullets Do to Bodies” was selected as number one. In light of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, this piece retains a startling relevance. It’s our number one piece this week. Editor Seyward Darby explains why. 1. What Bullets Do to BodiesJason Fagone | HuffPost Highline | April 26th, 2017 | 7,799 wordsI’m breaking from tradition here and highlighting a story that’s already been in one of these newsletters, and as a top pick no less. The circumstances demand it. On Tuesday, a gunman armed with two legally purchased AR-style assault rifles slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in a single classroom at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. As authorities worked to identify the victims, they asked parents to provide DNA samples. What’s unspoken in this detail is that the dead children were unrecognizable, or so mangled that it would have been an unimaginable cruelty to ask their parents to look at them. I can’t get this fact out of my mind, and it prompted me to re-read one of the best pieces of explanatory journalism in recent memory. Almost exactly five years ago, Jason Fagone spent time with the head of trauma surgery at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia to understand the damage that bullets do to bodies. What Dr. Amy Goldberg had to say about the Sandy Hook massacre could be said today about the shooting in Uvalde: “As a country, we lost our teachable moment…. The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.” America is a country where the mass murder of children is followed by mourning and forgetting, but never action: Congress hasn’t passed a single piece of gun control legislation since Sandy Hook. Until that changes, Goldberg’s comment will be relevant again in another community, at another school. It’s only a matter of time. —SD -- source link

More pics about