The Onion Dedicates Full-Page to Indicting America’s Inaction on Gun Violence: ‘No Way to Prevent This’
The satirical news website The Onion devoted itself to condemning America’s failure to prevent gun violence, turning their entire homepage into a monument of their bitter commentary on the country’s frequency for mass shootings.
News observers might be aware that The Onion has a recurring series of stories, all of which are headlined ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. Each story is tailored to the details of the tragedy du jour, but the core message is always the same: the country will weep and mourn for the lives lost, but a fictional interviewed bystander will assess “there’s nothing anyone can do” to stop such horribleness from happening again.
Past versions of the article have focused on events like the Charleston church shooting, the Las Vegas shooting, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and the massacre that just happened earlier this month at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
On Wednesday, The Onion published a new one in recognition of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas where 19 children and 2 adults were killed.
From the article:
“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.”
The Onion decided to take things further than re-upping the series, however. As of this writing, their homepage consists of 18 articles from the ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens series.
