If we showed you what mass shootings really are, you wouldn’t tolerate this inaction

On behalf of the entire news media of America, I apologize.

Although we have always positioned ourselves as fearless purveyors of truth, we have never shown you what a mass shooting really is.

We’re afraid you couldn’t take the truth. And that you’d hate us for showing it.

So media coverage of the Texas school massacre is what it always is. People in a parking lot, police and politicians at podiums, advocates and talking heads reciting trivial and uninformed position papers that we’ve all heard before.

It’s not reality.

I know this, because I have been to a mass shooting.

Oxnard, California, Dec. 2, 1993.

A jobless aerospace engineer with a grudge against the world opened fire in the local Employment Development Department office, killing three and wounding three others, including the wife of our mayor and the wife of my associate editor.

The gunman died in a hail of bullets as he tried to take the killing spree to the employment office in neighboring Ventura, but not before he killed an Oxnard Police detective who died trying to stop him.

I was managing editor of the Oxnard Press-Courier and was at my desk when a news assistant told me there was a report of a shooting at the unemployment office on the scanner.

I called the office and the phone was picked up. Nobody said anything, but I could hear moaning in the background.

I didn’t have any reporters in the office, so I grabbed a notebook and camera and ran for the door. It was about a block from our office to the employment office and I got there before police secured the scene.

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t. It’s nothing like what you see on TV.

It’s people dead on the floor and the wounded screaming, moaning and crying.

It’s desperation on the faces of paramedics slapping bandages on gaping, bloody holes in people, trying to keep them from bleeding out for long enough to get them to the hospital.

But the thing you remember most is the stench — a mix of voided bowels and bladders, vomit and freshly spilled blood in a confined space. It’s a noxious cocktail of suffering that never quite leaves the nostrils of those who have experienced it.

Police showed up pretty quickly and ushered me out. But I’d already seen, heard and smelled more than enough.

Later, a photographer told me that Bonnie Smith, the wife of my friend and associate editor Ed Smith, worked in the employment office and he was very worried because he hadn’t heard from her.

I beckoned an officer over and explained the situation. He told me to tell my editor to get over to Pleasant Valley Hospital right away.

I had to call Ed and tell him his wife had been shot. Ed was vision-impaired and couldn’t drive, so I asked him if he needed a ride. He said he had that arranged. I told him how sorry I was and if there was anything I could do to help, I would.

It was lame as hell. I make my living with words, but I didn’t have the right words for that situation. It took me a long time to realize there are no right words.

The next year, my staff and I won the California Newspaper Publishers Association award for best coverage of breaking news.

But we never showed Oxnard the reality I experienced.

I can tell you this much. If we ever did show what these things really look like, it would make a difference.

It would move the debate beyond this everlasting stalemate we’re in as we keep arguing with each other and the bodies keep piling up.

I defy anyone to look at pictures of 19 schoolchildren cut down in their classroom and not be moved to do something.

But we won’t show you that. We never do.

You’ll just have to take my word for it.

I’m sorry.