After a previous horrific massacre via AR-15, the one in Las Vegas last winter in which a single murderer killed or injured more than 600 people, readers wrote about that weapon and its history. For reference, those items were:

Now we have another massacre; more “thoughts and prayers” and other pious but empty rituals by legislators who will not do a single thing to reduce the chances of the next one; and more reaction from readers.

Can anything be done, by anyone or any organization, to stop the onslaught of gun violence? Readers suggest three approaches, involving: the media, the responsible gun-owning community, and the political opposition to the NRA.

Different media coverage. I mentioned yesterday the familiar cycles of news coverage: 24/7 updates, panels, and interviews by cable programs; explanatory pieces by big newspapers; snapshot photos showing victims when they were alive and happy, then respectful portraits of their families wracked by grief. What could be a different approach?

“Show Us the Carnage.” A reader, writing in after a different massacre, says that coverage is too respectful and tasteful:

The media needs to show Americans the truth. Watching tonight's news coverage of the massacre, it was bizarrely possible to think of a mass shooting as a random event like a tornado that causes a community to rally together. Thoughts and prayers for all. Yet entirely missing from the coverage was the truth of what had happened. No pictures of pools of blood. No video of blown out brains. No images of dead children in pews. Just as the tide of public opinion against the war in Vietnam did not turn until images of the war reached into American living rooms, today's epidemic of mass shootings will not end until Americans see and share in the bloody experience. Scalia's Heller decision will not join Taney's Dred Scott opinion in the ash heap of history until Americans are moved to action by indelible images from mass shootings of suffering and death. So here is a plea to the media. Do not let decency standards shield us from this indecency. Show us the carnage and do not let Americans look away from what the NRA's lobbying has wrought.

This reader is right, that photos made a difference in the Vietnam era. The recent Ken Burns / Lynn Novick Vietnam documentary series went into the detailed background of the two photos that ran on the front pages of most newspapers, and that anyone alive in that era can recall. One was of a nine-year-old girl running naked, and in terror, away from a napalm strike. The other was of a South Vietnamese general blowing out the brains (literally) of a North Vietnamese agent / spy. A decade earlier, the photo of the battered body of the lynched Emmett Till also revealed what had happened to him in a way mere words could not have done. And lest we forget: the black-eye photo of one of Rob Porter’s ex-wives, Colbie Holderness.