"'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" is the recurring title of articles published by the American news satire organization The Onion after mass shootings in the United States. The articles satirize and lament the country's failure, unique among developed countries, to prevent gun violence. [1] [2] [3]
Each article is about 200 words long, detailing the location of the shooting and the number of victims, but otherwise remaining essentially the same. A fictitious resident—usually of a state in which the shooting did not take place—is quoted as saying that the shooting was "a terrible tragedy", but "there's nothing anyone can do to stop them." The article ends by saying that the United States is the "only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years," and that Americans view themselves and the situation as "helpless". [4] [5]
The article was first published on May 27, 2014, following the Isla Vista killings. The Onion has since republished the article after dozens of mass shootings, changed only to reflect the specifics of each shooting. [1] [2] [3] In 2017, Marnie Shure, the managing editor for The Onion, said: "By re-running the same commentary, it strengthens the original commentary tenfold each time....In the wake of these really terrible things, we have this comment that really holds up." [6]
After The Onion republished the article on February 14, 2018, following the Parkland high school shooting, Jason Roeder, the writer of the original 2014 article, wrote that he "had no idea it would be applied to the high school a mile from [his] house". [7] On May 25, 2022, after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, The Onion featured all 21 versions of the article they had written since 2014 on the home page of their website and on their Twitter feed. [8] [9] [10] The homepage feature was repeated after the July 4 Highland Park shooting, when the article count had increased to 25. [11] [12] As of December 2024, it has been published 38 times.
The New York Times wrote in 2017 that "with each use, [the headline] seemed to turn from cheeky political commentary on gun control into a reverberation of despair". [1] Mashable wrote that "nothing captures that feeling of frustration and powerlessness" following major mass shootings as well as The Onion articles, adding that "there's no shortage of brilliant Onion pieces, but none have resonated—or been as tragically prescient—like the 'No Way' post." [13]
The Washington Post wrote that The Onion "appears to capture the frustration and futility felt by so many people" following mass shootings, noting the increased Internet traffic the articles draw and how popular they are on social media. [2] The Huffington Post said the articles have become "a staple of the social media response to mass shootings", citing how widely shared they are on Facebook and Twitter. [3]
The Daily Beast mentioned the articles in a piece titled "How The Onion Became One of the Strongest Voices for Gun Control". [14] Similarly, Wired mentioned it in an article discussing the power of The Onion's satire in the face of gun violence, titled "Only The Onion Can Save Us Now". [15]
As of December 2024 [update] , The Onion has published the article 38 times, each in response to a mass shooting in the United States.
The North Atlantic Treaty, also known as the Washington Treaty, forms the legal basis of, and is implemented by, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., on 4 April 1949.
The Onion is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is currently based in Chicago, but originated as a weekly print publication on August 29, 1988, in Madison, Wisconsin. The Onion began publishing online in early 1996. In 2007, they began publishing satirical news audio and video online as the Onion News Network. In 2013, The Onion stopped publishing its print edition and launched Onion Labs, an advertising agency. The Onion was then acquired three times, first by Univision in 2016, which later merged The Onion and its several other publications into those of Gizmodo Media Group. This unit was sold in 2019 to Great Hill Partners, forming a new company named G/O Media. Then, in April 2024, G/O Media sold The Onion to Global Tetrahedron, a firm newly created by former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, which revived the print edition in August that year.
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Incel is a term associated with an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, and blame, objectify and denigrate women and girls as a result. The movement is strongly linked to misogyny. Originally coined as "invcel" around 1997 by a queer Canadian female student known as Alana, the spelling had shifted to "incel" by 1999, and the term later rose to prominence in the 2010s, following the influence of misogynistic terrorists Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.
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