Since 2014, The Onion has run the same satirical and heartbreaking story nearly every time there’s a mass shooting. Each time, it has the same devastating headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says the Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Each time, the words are the same. Only the details are changed. But after the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school, they stepped up.
https://twitter.com/EoinHiggins_/status/1529483504857251844
As caught by Deadline, the satirical site devoted the entirety of their homepage real estate to over 20 of the variations they’ve run over the years. In the top lefthand corner, is the story, altered for Uvalde. To its right is one for the 2021 FedEx shooting in Indianapolis. To that one’s right is one for the 2020 massacre in Minneapolis. And so on and so forth, reminding people about the mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, in Atlanta, Georgia, in Dayton, Ohio, and on and on and on and on and on, etc.
Here is a sample of the article, in the version they did for Uvalde:
UVALDE, TX—In the hours following a violent rampage in Texas in which a lone attacker killed at least 21 individuals and injured several others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said Idaho resident Kathy Miller, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this individual from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what they really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”
The latest massacre, the deadliest K-12 school shooting since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, has prompted a tidal wave of pushback, from Beto O’Rourke, from Matthew McConaughey, from Whoopi Goldberg and Stephen Colbert and Taylor Swift and Steve Kerr and more. The GOP, meanwhile, has been slammed for threatening to do what they usually do in the face of mass shootings: nothing, apart from collecting NRA money.
You can check out the Onion’s homepage while it lasts.
(Via Deadline)