In the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the satirical website the Onion overhauled its entire homepage to promote an 8-year-old article about mass shootings it has published nearly two dozen times.
“'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” reads the headline of the piece, first published in May 2014, after a gunman killed six people near the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Screenshot from the Onion.
theonion.com
“In the hours following a violent rampage in downtown Charleston in which a lone killed nine individuals and seriously injured one other, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Wednesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place,” read the article the second time it was published, in June 2015, when a white supremacist killed nine Black members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church during a Bible study.
The piece then swapped the name of a different fictional resident of a real state for a quote — as it did again in 2017, after a gunman killed 60 people at a concert in Las Vegas, citing an accurate statistic about the dangers of living in America.
“‘This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,’ said Iowa resident Kyle Rimmels, 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.”
The most recent version, following the deaths of 19 elementary students and two teachers, included updated statistics noting events of the last eight years.