Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines broke down in tears on Wednesday’s episode of The View after discussing the urgent pleas for gun reform.
According to Decider, the panel talked about Matthew McConaughey’s tearful speech at Tuesday’s White House press conference. During the speech, McConaughey, an Uvalde, TX native, talked about the lives of some of the victims of the Robb Elementary School massacre. He also pleaded with Congress to pass common sense legislation to save lives.
Whoopi Goldberg started off with her frustration, saying, "What else is it going to take before something is done here? Maybe the people who make these decisions need to see these graphic photographs of what these guns do to little kids' bodies."
Haines also said that showing photos of crime scene should change people’s minds and help get laws passed, but she also said that lawmakers should be forced to reckon with their inaction.
“Showing the pictures, whether it helps or not, they should be forced to sit and look at these pictures…when we talk about, ‘Nothing happens after these shootings,’ we’re speaking on a federal level,” she said. “On the local level in these communities, thse schools, these parents, they make it their mission to continue to fight for these things.”
She got emotional as she said, "The part that really bothers me here is--and I speak as a parent right now--there are so many things we can't take from our kids
“Like, they will lose us one day. They will lose their grandparents, they will lose a pet, they will lose a friend that gets ill young. There are so many things that we will have to be there to hold them up and say, ‘We can’t take this from you. This we can do something about.'”
"And so as a parent, I don't know how you get ina room and say when there are so many gun owners--like Matthew McConaughey, like my parents--who will say, 'This stuff [a culture of mass shootings] makes sense,'" she continued. "Why are not coming together and just looking at these little faces and saying, 'This is one thing we can change?'"
Hostin also broke down as well, saying how everyone has been “emotional” about this issue. As she said that perhaps pictures of the trauma could help change Republicans’ attitudes, much like Emmett Till’s brutalized body did for the Civil Rights Movement and the picture of the “napalm girl” did for ending the Vietnam War. She added that she knows the victims’ parents want to remember their children as they were in life. But she said that these photos might make the difference.
"Photos matter. These politicians…they need to see these photographs."
To be fair, the discussion about showing the victims’ autopsy photos has been a hot topic, with many feeling like Haines and Hostin. Others, however, have felt like it would be disrespectful to the families and the victims, and that it shouldn’t take seeing the victims’ pictures to make people engage in their humanity. Regardless, the drumbeat for gun reform has been louder than it’s ever been.
