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Honest question: When is it appropriate to talk about this stuff? I see this often: "We are speaking about <event> too soon after it happened, we need to let the families <grieve|move on|have space>." It seems like one <event> happens, we can't talk about it, then a new one happens and the cycle goes on, never stopping to sit down and discuss how we keep ending up here.

It's appropriate _now_ to discuss the shooting; but I'm not really sure it's ever going to be appropriate to turn the Onion's blistering satire into a punchline here.

What the Onion did is a valid, necessary, mildly amusing, but incredibly pointed and powerful criticism of the gun problem in America.

What this article is doing is making that criticism into a punchline in and of itself. That is what is disrespectful.

In case you didn't know, The Onion uses the article format as a template with only names/places/dates changed for quite a lot of major mass shootings.

Indeed. The templating just reinforces the critique, too.

I'm living outside of the US and this is the first time I heard of this. I did not have any intentions to link my release to a recent shooting.

Aren't shootings a daily occurrence in the US? Are we never allowed to allude because of recency?