Thread by @tmprowell

🧵 My oncology colleagues know how often I say: #WordsMatter. So I’m thinking about words we use to talk about #RobbElementary & every other incident of #GunViolence in 🇺🇸. Part of why people can scroll past these things, why they may not even register as news to us... /1

Is that somewhere along the way, we had words like “school shooter” & “gunman” drilled into our consciousness as the usual terms. These things oddly sound more like jobs—‘school shooter’ sounds like school principal or school secretary & ‘gunman’ like fireman or repairman… /2

And hear me out on this because the same sentence lands very differently if you substitute, for example, mass murderer or elem school killer. Try it. Grab any article. Listen to any news story. Swap all the words. #Uvalde school shooting m becomes #RobbElemementaryMassacre. /3

Change the verbs too. Choose ones that capture the horror. Forget passivity. No more “shots could be heard in the pkg lot where parents had anxiously gathered.” Instead “terror-stricken parents, prevented from entering, were forced to listen to their kids being executed.” /4

It’s uncomfortable, isn’t it, to speak or write like that? The NR* has a thirst to sell civilians weapons that blast open kids’ heads, leaving them unrecognizable to their own parents. They bank on our choosing polite terms. We’ve been manipulated. No more. #WordsMatter /End