News story about a news story

[robkelk]

The Onion's 'no way to prevent this' satire published for 21st time in response to Texas mass shooting

The site's homepage for the day the story was run one more time:

[Labster]

To me, though, the satire has lost its edge, because it's just stating a fact. There was nothing that could have prevented that tragedy, nor is there anything we can do to prevent the next 21 mass shootings.

Sure, we could change the laws on access to guns.  But can we?  Most of the time, there's no way for those laws to pass.  But then there are places like California that routinely pass gun control laws, and federal courts that routinely overturn those laws.  And judges have lifetime appointments, unless they get shot to death in a mass shooting.  In this last shooting, we showed that not only can the police not do anything to stop it, but they actively stopped another "good guy with a gun" from entering the building and arrested him.  So enforcing the laws we do have wouldn't help any more either.

A constitutional amendment would have to be ratified by three-quarters of all states.  Can you come up with thirteen states that would never vote to change the second amendment?  Let's see: Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Maine, Kansas, Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas.  That wasn't even that hard, and there are more states.  So no, we can't just change laws on guns.

We can't just make people who have access to guns less likely to want to use them this way.  I mean, we could improve the social safety net so people don't get left behind, and we could reduce the inequality in our culture?  But can we?  Those things sound an awful lot like socialism, and honestly the United States is heading in the other direction of having more inequality.  Or maybe we could encourage religion more, so that people belong to a community and have more moral guidance?  Except that's illegal for the government to do, and again the society is becoming more secular right now anyway.  Literally everyone knows killing a bunch of children is morally wrong anyway yet it still happens.

So, what's to be done, then?  As far as I can see, nothing.

We had a thread about these kinds of shootings before on this forum, and people got mad at each other and no one changed their mind.  Why did you even post this?  To make fun of us Americans?  I mean, if we want to talk climate change for a minute nearly every nation has their head stuck in the sand.  They all agreed to a treaty where they would "phase down" coal and thought that was a big accomplishment.  A fuel that every year produces more radioactive pollution than every nuclear accident ever, and we can't even agree that stopping its use is a good idea.  And since that was agreed, coal consumption has increased.

[robkelk]

And with the very first reply, the thread stops being about The Onion...

[Labster]

If an Area Man wanted it to be about the Onion, he’d have posted it outside the politics forum.

[robkelk]

And would have had the thread moved to Politics. It's happened before.

[hazard]

Yes yes Labster, the USA is very pitiful and weak, we know.

Really, the fact that the Onion can keep posting the exact same story, just swap the names around, for something as horrible as the mass murder of elementary school age children rather shows that the USA is deeply broken. And sure, not all of the 21 times the Onion published that story were about school shootings, but how long has it been since the first time they posted it?