The story behind "No Way to Prevent This Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens"
It’s a grim ritual response to a devastating recurrence. After nearly every mass shooting in the U.S., the headline appears in the satirical news site, The Onion: “No Way to Prevent This Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Those twelve words seem to contain so much of the anger and frustration over gun violence and gun control. And their repetition on the occasion of every shooting makes their grim commentary that much more powerful.
How did this very famous — and very tragic — joke come to be?
It was the creation of a comedy writer named Jason Roeder, a former senior editor for The Onion. Roeder tells Inside Edition Digital that it came to him one sad day in May of 2014. Six people had been killed in a shooting in Isla Vista, California. Roeder says, “I just remember jotting down this headline in frustration” before the day’s editorial meeting. “There wasn't some sort of grand plan. It was just something that occurred to me and pretty quickly, and that was it.”
The headline made it into The Onion, and in the way it tried to make sense of a senseless event, it struck a chord. “Sometimes something is really dark and all you can do is use humor to point out something absurd or hypocritical about the reaction to that thing,” Roeder says.
On the occasion of the next mass shooting, The Onion used the headline again. And again, after that. “It just became the perfect thing to say after a shooting,” Roeder observed. “Comedy doesn't fix things, and so it was just a way of expressing the continuing anguish and grief and sense of hopelessness around these incidents. So it becomes its own thing … it becomes a bigger joke than the initial joke.” Roeder is guarded in his use of the word “joke” here. “I use that term in a very sort of sad, solemn way, but it is a joke and just the accrual over the years, it becomes this bigger and bigger statement.”
Almost a decade after its initial appearance, the use of ‘No Way to Prevent This’ may be as predictable as gun violence itself. Roeder says, “People in a very sort of grim way wait for it. The news trickles out that there was an awful shooting and a couple of hours later, The Onion headline surfaces and people expect it. It's part of the ritual in a lot of ways for some people … It's part of the expression of frustration. It's part of the expression of grief and exasperation.”
Roeder says he’s lost count of how many times the headline has been employed as a response to mass shootings in the U.S., adding, “It's a really sad thing where you just can't keep track.” (As of September 2023, it’s been used 35 times.)
Gun violence is not the only difficult, painful topic Roeder has wrestled with using humor. He took advantage of some pandemic lockdown downtime to pen “Griefstrike! The Ultimate Guide to Mourning.” “I wrote it after my mother passed away in 2019, and the idea was I hadn't seen any treatments of grief and death and dying that mirrored the voice of The Onion or 'The Daily Show' or things like that,” he shares. “I thought just having a pathway to humor, to comedy for people in mourning might be of use to them at a certain point in the grieving process. Having gone through all this sort of trauma, the book isn't really meant as sort of a therapeutic resource. It's meant as kind of an insane companion, I guess, from someone who's been there.”
As for that headline, being the creator of “No Way to Prevent This” is a dubious honor for Roeder, and he says he’d be happy if it never had to be used again. “I long for the day when this joke is retired forever, and then I can be the guy that wrote that thing that used to be circulated but is no longer because there's no need because we've gotten a handle on this thing … I would like it to be obsolete real soon. I don't think it's going to happen. I have this really sick sense that it's going to outlive me on this planet, but I don't know. I would love for it to be a non-thing as soon as humanly possible.”
But for now, he reflects, “We're in this cycle of national violence and it doesn't seem to bother us very much.”
