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gun violence
Media Justice as The Onion Buys Infowars From 'Hateful' (and Bankrupt) Alex Jones
"This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything's kind of insane," said the CEO of The Onion.
Nov 14, 2024
In what one journalist called an "insane twist" to the long saga of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' use of his online platform to spread rampant disinformation, satirical newspaper The Onion on Thursday announced it had won an auction to buy Infowars, Jones' bankrupt publication.
Jones declared bankruptcy in 2022 after the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting won nearly $1.5 billion in damages in lawsuits they filed over Jones' repeated claims on his show that the shooting had been a hoax.
Jones claimed the families and victims—20 first graders and six educators—were crisis actors, inciting his supporters to threaten the grieving families.
The auction included everything from Jones' desk and production studio to his diet supplement line, and the Sandy Hook families supported The Onion's effort to take control of Infowars, which the company said would be relaunched as a parody of itself.
"The Onion's goal with the acquisition is to end Infowars' relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion's relentless barrage of humor for good," said the company in a press release, which did not state how much The Onion paid for Infowars.
Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion's parent company, Global Tetrahedron, toldThe New York Times that he and other leaders at the newspaper initially thought purchasing Infowars "would be a hilarious joke" to play on Jones.
"This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything's kind of insane," he told the Times.
Collins, who previously reported on misinformation for NBC News, reached out to a lawyer representing Sandy Hook families and asked for their input on The Onion's auction bid. The families approved.
"By divesting Jones of Infowars' assets, the families and the team at The Onion have done a public service and will meaningfully hinder Jones' ability to do more harm."
"From Day One, these families have fought against all odds to bring true accountability to Alex Jones and his corrupt business," said Chris Mattei, the families' lawyer. "Our clients knew that true accountability meant an end to Infowars and an end to Jones' ability to spread lies, pain, and fear at scale... By divesting Jones of Infowars' assets, the families and the team at The Onion have done a public service and will meaningfully hinder Jones' ability to do more harm."
Mattei added that the families rejected Jones' offer "for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm's way."
Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed at Sandy Hook, said in a statement that the families had been "told this outcome would be nearly impossible, but we are no strangers to impossible fights."
"The world needs to see that having a platform does not mean you are above accountability—the dissolution of Alex Jones' assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for," said Parker.
The Onion has "made an indelible mark on the public response to school shootings," said the company, pointing to its repeated printing of the headline, "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens," which has appeared in the newspaper 37 times following school shootings.
Advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety plans to work closely with The Onion on the new Infowars parody site, which Collins said would mock "weird internet personalities" who traffic in misinformation. Everytown has signed a multiyear advertising deal with the company.
"Alex Jones has profited off the pain of Sandy Hook families," said Everytown, "and his brand of hateful disinformation has seeped into mainstream American culture.We're excited to join them as they turn the page on this toxic chapter of misinformation and begin the next chapter of InfoWars, turning it into a tool to combat disinformation and extremism through humor. Not only will this new venture staunch the flow of hurtful misinformation, but it also holds significant potential for us to reach new audiences in the fight for gun safety."
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My Best Friend Died By Firearm Suicide; Here’s Why I Advocate for Stronger Gun Safety Laws
Withjust one month until election day, it’s time for American voters to come together and elect leaders who will fight to protect our communities from gun violence.
Oct 05, 2024
Warning: This piece discusses suicide, gun violence, and mental health. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call or text 988, or visit 988lifeline.org/chat to chat with a counselor from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Last year, I received a text that would change my life forever. I was told that my close friend, Jordan, had died by firearm suicide. Calls from classmates came crashing in and emails from my school flooded my inbox. A wave of shock rushed over me and it felt like time had frozen, even as I watched the world continue on.
My school held an assembly to honor Jordan’s memory, but it all became a blur between the tears, hugs, tissues, and funeral.
Jordan holds a special place in my heart. Not only because we were on the same lacrosse team, but because she was a shining light and a good friend. She was always there for me when I needed her, but little did I know Jordan was battling a thunderstorm on the inside.
Amidst all my grief, there was a part of me that was also angry because politicians sent their condolences, but no action was taken. I wanted something to change.
There are thousands of students and young people just like me across the country who are committed to creating a future free from gun violence.
The tragedy of this story isn’t just about Jordan; it’s the fact that her story is not unique. When there are over 3,000 young people who die by gun suicide in an average year, something has to change. Stronger gun safety measures, like secure storage requirements, in our country can save lives and prevent more friends and families from feeling the pain I’ve felt.
Firearm suicide has a deadly and devastating impact on my generation. Over the past decade, gun suicide rates for young people have increased faster than any other age group, reaching a near-record high. When it comes to attempted suicide, guns are especially deadly. We have to do more to reduce easy access to guns in a moment of crisis since the majority of people who survive a suicide attempt don’t go on to attempt again.
Those statistics should be a wake-up call for every gun owner, politician, and person in the United States on why it’s so important to prevent firearm access for someone contemplating suicide. That’s where laws like secure storage requirements come in.
Secure storage is the practice of gun owners making their homes and communities safer by storing their guns securely. This means storing a firearm unloaded, locked, and separate from ammunition. Research shows that most firearm suicides attempted by youth occur at home, and households that securely store guns and ammunition reduce this risk by 78% comapared to those that don’t.
There is a direct correlation between securely storing a gun at home and saving a life from firearm suicide. That’s why we need lawmakers at every level of government to increase awareness around secure storage practices and pass laws that require gun owners to store their guns securely.
Withjust one month until election day, it’s time for American voters to come together and elect leaders who will fight to protect our communities from gun violence. From electing Vice President Harris and Governor Walz at the top of the ticket to voting for gun sense candidates down ballot, these are the candidates that are fighting to end gun violence while the other side is doing absolutely nothing.
Even in the face of tragedy, I still have hope. Firearm suicide, just like all forms of gun violence, is preventable.
After the loss of my best friend, I felt devastated and I wanted to find a community that shared my similar experiences. I soon discovered Students Demand Action, the nation's largest youth-led gun prevention group, and started a chapter at my school. Since then, I have been actively involved in fighting for gun violence prevention in California, and I’m just getting started.
We should all be aware of the warning signs and how to help when someone is in crisis. Whether it’s having a private conversation to let someone know you’re there for them or sharing mental health resources, that one step could save a life.
There are thousands of students and young people just like me across the country who are committed to creating a future free from gun violence. Guns are the leading cause of death for my generation, meaning youth firearm suicide is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. When guns are accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time—no one is safe.
But even in the face of tragedy, I still have hope. Firearm suicide, just like all forms of gun violence, is preventable. Joining Students Demand Action allowed me to turn my pain into purpose and together, we can end America’s gun violence epidemic by creating a future for our generation that’s free from gun violence.Keep ReadingShow Less
Even a Good President With a Gun Won’t Save Us
VP Harris’ recent political messaging about guns has been less about curbing them and more about how she and her running mate Tim Walz possess them. But that won’t prevent mass shootings.
Sep 25, 2024
It’s happened far more times than I care to remember. Waking up super early on Sunday morning to write my weekend column, I flip on the TV and there’s some dark and fuzzy video of multiple police cars, flashing blue and red outside some urban nightclub or restaurant, as the anchors solemnly report that while we were sleeping, there was yet another mass shooting in America.
But this Sunday morning, the news cut a little differently.
The rapid machine-gun-like fire had lit up a crowded street in Birmingham, Alabama, the city where I lived and worked as a young journalist in the early 1980s. CNN zoomed in with a map, and my heart sank because I instantly knew the exact area where four people were murdered and another 17 were injured, some seriously.
If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1:00 pm NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?
The shooter, or possibly more than one shooter, fired more than 100 rounds at a packed sidewalk in the Birmingham entertainment district known as Five Points South, a few blocks from the University of Alabama-Birmingham campus. My fading 20-something memories of the place are fond ones—meeting journalist pals for a beer on the Deep South’s brutally humid summer nights, nodding along with the ever-present Alabama or Auburn fans, even drinking my first-ever Long Island iced tea (and, thankfully, one of my last) from a Mason jar.
Some 40 years later, it took just a few seconds for a shooter with a legal semi-automatic and, police believe, a “switch” that turned it into a machine gun, to shatter any happy recollections of the place, and the lives of the people there just out for a fun Saturday night.
“All of a sudden it was just gunshots, gunshots, gunshots,” 24-year-old Gabriel Eslami, who was on the line for the Hush hookah bar, told CNN. “I started running for my life”—but he was struck by a bullet in the leg and fell to the ground. When he looked up, the scene felt like a “horror movie... There are bodies laid out all over the sidewalk, gun smoke in the air. There are shoes. People ran out of their shoes trying to escape. I saw people hiding behind cars, laying under cars.”
It may have sounded like the climax of a gory Hollywood movie, but in 2024 news cycle, the Birmingham mass shooting was something of a blip. NPR did lead its Monday afternoon newscast with the story, but The New York Times buried its print article on pageA14. In an age of school shootings and presidential assassination attempts, bursts of gunfire on crowded city streets are getting shorter and shorter shrift. This was, after all, the third quadruple murder in Birmingham this year, including one outside a public library. Didn’t hear about that? Me neither.
And yet like any mass shooting in the only developed nation that routinely has them, the Birmingham incident raised some serious questions about policy. Why has the gun-loving red state of Alabama not banned these switches, given their potential for mass carnage? Why has Birmingham seen its murder rate increase in 2024, even as crime is mostly falling nationally? Are we truly helpless to get high-powered assault weapons—subject to an imperfect but highly effective federal ban from 1994-2004—off the streets of America’s cities?
If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1:00 pm NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?
Where is the sense of outrage from the Democratic ticket and the media that I felt when I saw that somebody used an assault rifle to carry out an act of terrorism in Birmingham?
One place where the bullets didn’t seem to have much impact was in the presidential race, where guns have been an issue, but not always in the ways one might expect. To be sure, the Democrats are the party that believes government can do something to reduce gun violence. I was there in Chicago’s United Center in August when the loved ones of gunfire victims gave poignant pleas to Democrats, and the party has vowed to again to ban assault rifles and enact common-sense gun laws—in the highly unlikely event it can get around a GOP Senate filibuster. Republican nominee Donald Trump brags that when he was president,“nothing happened” to stop mass killings.
The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, didn’t release a statement about the Birmingham shooting. Maybe there’s just too many mass shootings in America, or maybe it would be different if Alabama were a swing state. But also, Harris’ recent political messaging about guns has been less about curbing them and more about how she and her running mate Tim Walz possess them.
Harris again confirmed last week to Oprah Winfrey that she owns a gun for her personal protection from her prosecutor days, telling the TV icon that “if somebody’s breaking into my house, they’re getting shot.” First, if someone’s breaking into the vice president’s home, then the Secret Service is in worse shape than we thought. Second, multiple studies have shown that people with guns in their home are more likely to get shot than those who do not, so I’m not sure why Harris encourages that choice. Her campaign then released an online spot that kicked off with highlighting her gun ownership before saying all the right things, including support for an assault-weapons ban.
It’s Politics 101, right? Harris didn’t have to run in any primaries and woo left-wing Democrats as she did for a time in 2019, but now she hopes her affirmation of gun ownership will win over middle-of-the-road undecideds in the general election. Except where is the sense of outrage from the Democratic ticket and the media that I felt when I saw that somebody used an assault rifle to carry out an act of terrorism in Birmingham? Because that outrage is necessary to convince the public that we need some radical changes if people are going to feel safe again going out on a Saturday night, or putting our kids on a school bus.
A good president with a gun wouldn’t have stopped a mass killing in Birmingham. A good president with a moral crusade and a plan just might stop the next one.
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