After July 4th Mass Shooting, The Onion Depressingly Reprises ‘No Way to Prevent This’ Homepage Takeover
Following the shooting deaths of at least six people at a July 4th parade in a Chicago suburb, satirical publication The Onion renewed its implicit call for U.S. gun controls — posting 25 articles on its homepage with same headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The publication’s post on the gun massacre in Highland Park, Ill., followed the same template it has used for at least two dozen articles since 2014. The attack in Highland Park was the seventh mass shooting in the U.S. in 2022. In May, The Onion staged the same homepage takeover after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two adults dead at an elementary school there.
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The Onion’s latest article reads, “In the hours following a violent rampage in which a lone attacker killed at least six individuals and injured more than two dozen at a Fourth of July parade, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Monday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place.”
The fake news story quotes the same fake interview subject as the prior articles in the grim series, who says in part, “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep shooters like this from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what they really wanted.”
The NRA, a few hours prior to the Highland Park massacre, posted on Twitter, “Happy 4th of July, America! We are a country because of brave souls with guns who valued and fought for liberty and freedom.” Later in the day, the NRA account retweeted a post by Ryan Fournier, head of Students for Trump, saying, “The @NRA is once again the only organization in America that gets blamed for crimes their members never commit.”
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