When Satire Says What The Pundits Don’t

The Onion is the best printed source of “fake news” in America. It ranks with “The Daily Show” at showing our foibles as Americans in an entertaining way.

Yesterday, the Onion published a funny headline. Only there was nothing funny about it.

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

Think about that. Let it sink in. This is from the accompanying article.

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, 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.

Does anyone really think that this latest, senseless killing will have any effect on gun laws in this country? Ask yourself. Did Sandy Hook? Did little children having gaping holes blown through their heads, coating their classroom floor with their blood, spattering their cute little first and second grade drawings pinned to the wall with their little first and second grade brains and skull fragments as they cowered in terror, being killed one at a time by the crazy man whose Mommy bought him a gun because she thought it might cheer him up before he killed her with it? Did that make Congress take the action that nearly three-quarters of Americans demanded of Congress?

And if the brutal slaughter of these babies, the mutilation of these young bodies that had to stay in the school overnight so the authorities could properly document the crime scene before their blown-apart little corpses could be delivered to their grieving parents to be buried some seven decades before their time… if that didn’t motivate your elected representatives to take action out of fear of the NRA, what makes you think the murder of some college students is going to make any difference?

The Onion article concluded:

It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

With the passage of Citizens United and the SCOTUS ruling in McCutcheon, what makes you think the cowards who represent you in Congress are going to stand up to the almighty National Rifle Association NOW?

After all, whose country is this? Ours? Or THEIRS?

I used to believe that the occasional mass murder was a price Americans were willing to pay as long as it was someone else getting murdered and they got to keep their guns. Now I believe that the vast majority of Americans would accept sensible limits on the Second Amendment to keep this sort of thing from happening again. Too bad that the vast majority of Americans no longer have a voice in Washington, isn’t it just?

By: Bill Schmalfeldt

I no longer use Twitter or Facebook because they are evil. I do continue to blog at http://Schmalfeldt.org, where you can get information about other stuff I do, like comedy/parody CDs and MP3 downloads and audiobooks and such. Get yours now. When I'm dead, there will be a drastic price increase.