GEOFF BENNETT: We are going to shift our focus now to gun violence in America and the fraught question over whether the news media should show graphic images of the carnage it causes.

Does avoiding those images conceal the horror of that violence, or does showing them cause further trauma to people who have already suffered so much?

William Brangham picks up that conversation.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Last week, The Washington Post waded into this debate and published images of the damage caused by AR-15-style weapons.

We're going to show a few of them in a moment.

Please be warned, they are very hard to look at.

The series is called "Terror on Repeat" and includes some never-before-published images of recent mass shootings, like how this weapon punched clean through a metal door at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, where 21 were murdered, or how it can in just moments spray countless bullets across a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where 26 people were killed.

The images get worse, the corner of a classroom at Robb Elementary where wounded children and teachers waited over an hour for any help, in Las Vegas, the dead and wounded laying on a grassy concert field; 60 people were killed that night.

The last image in the series shows some of the victims in Uvalde gathered in a hallway waiting to be carried away.

Matea Gold is a managing editor at The Washington Post, and she oversaw this project.

Thank you so much for being here.

Extremely difficult reporting that you all have done.

There are more images in this series and a great deal of testimony from people who survived some of these tragedies.

Could you help us understand a little bit the decision you all made to publish these?

MATEA GOLD, The Washington Post: Sure.

Thank you so much for having me, first of all.

We have been spending the last year examining the role of the AR-15 in America.

And as part of that, in the spring, we actually did a piece that looked through illustrations at the impact that an AR-15 has on a human body.

That was a piece we managed very carefully.

We consulted with family members of victims.

We wanted to make sure in that process we didn't cause more harm.

But we did want to try to illustrate the really specific destructive force of this weapon.

The reaction we got to that piece prompted us to have further conversations, because many in the public actually said we should be going further, that we were actually sanitizing the impact on the body.

And they wanted us to really question whether there was more we should be sharing with the public.

So that spurred a series of conversations we have been having over months inside the Post newsroom, really wrestling with what we owed the readers and the public to show them about the impact of this weapon at a time when mass shootings are on track to really hit record numbers in the United States.

We are balancing that public service mission to really help people understand this very real challenge with the desire to minimize harm as much as we could, to make sure we were sensitive to family members and survivors.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, is it your sense that the American population doesn't fully appreciate what these weapons, which were designed for the military, as you report, what they really do?

MATEA GOLD: Yes, I mean, one of the things that became very clear in our reporting in this series is that there's a small group of Americans who have a unique window into the destruction caused by AR-15s.

They are the victims, the family members, and first responders.

And over and over again, we heard from them that what they saw was indescribable, that that was something that will affect them the rest of their lives.

And it's something we realized that is sort of walled off from the public, in part because journalists don't have access to these crime scenes.

Much of the -- many of the crime scene folks that are taken by law enforcement officials are kept private, in part because of new laws passed in the wake of the Newtown shooting.

And so, really, what the public usually sees are sort of the iconic images of the crime scene tape and then the memorials.

And we thought there was more to explore and that we owed our readers an exploration of what damage was really caused by these weapons.

It was very specific to the force of this gun.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: A year or so ago, we had a conversation with Sandy Phillips, who, as you know, is a mother who lost her daughter Jessi in the Aurora massacre a decade ago.

And Sandy is very pro cracking down on these weapons.

She has spoken very viscerally about what that weapon did to her daughter physically.

But she did not like this idea of images of readily identifiable individuals getting out there.

And I just want to play a tiny bit of what she had to say.

SANDY PHILLIPS, Mother of Shooting Victim: They can go online and see what AR-15s do to a watermelon and how it explodes a watermelon.

They can go online and see that damage that it does to a mannequin.

They can see damage that it does to a deer.

They don't need and they aren't privileged to see what that did to my daughter.

And I don't want that image ever to be out there for anyone else to see.

So is that something that we as a society really want to do to the families that have already lost so much, had so much taken from them?

I hope not.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I should clarify, you did not do this at The Post.

You did not show images of any readily identifiable individuals.

But what do you make of that sentiment, that having these kinds of images out there can be re-traumatizing to people?

MATEA GOLD: That was something we took incredibly seriously, and we had conversations with dozens and dozens of family members in the course of reporting this story.

We heard from family members who felt that they thought very strongly that bodies should be shown, that that would wake the public up to the damage caused.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Should be shown.

MATEA GOLD: Should be shown.

Others felt that that would be very traumatizing and dehumanizing.

We made a decision in our reporting very early on that, if we were going to show any identifiable bodies, we would only do that with the full consent of family members.

In the end, we decided it wasn't necessary for really the public to get a sense of the full scope of the destruction caused by these weapons.

I think some of the power of the images in this piece are what is absent and what you see in the aftermath of what happens after the bodies are carried out of the room.

And we tried as much as possible to weigh how much we needed to put in this story against the effort to really make sure families did not feel traumatized by this.

The other step we -- we took a couple other steps, I think it's important to note.

One is that we went through a process of notifying survivor communities in all 11 cities where these mass shootings took place that we refer to in the piece days in advance to try to make sure we could spread the word as wide as possible that we'd be publishing this piece, that it could be something very difficult to see if you or someone you love has been in a mass shooting.

We wanted to give people a chance to avoid this if they did not want to see it.

We also built in very specific warnings to readers and tried to use very clear language about what they would experience if they decided to go through the story and continue to scroll through each piece of it.

At every step, we want people to be making an informed decision about whether they feel they are ready to look at these images.

One of the things that's been so striking about the response is that so many people have written to say that they actually learned something very profound from this piece.

They felt that they did not fully understand what was happening in these incidents, and that was really, I think, what we were trying to achieve, which was a sense of real, clear understanding about what so many Americans have gone through.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: That is the principal goal, in your mind, to help people see beyond that, as you described, this -- what this small circle of people understand?

MATEA GOLD: I think, if we are going to wrestle with this issue as a country, and it's important for everyone to have sort of a shared sense of what we are talking about, our goal is just to present information, to present clear, powerful journalism that helps people understand the challenges that we face as a nation.

And that was really what we saw as our through line through this.

And I think the response has been very gratifying, because I think many, many people appreciate the fact that they have had the opportunity to understand what so many Americans have gone through.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Matea Gold of The Washington Post, thank you so much.

MATEA GOLD: Thank you for having me.