"Who Shot Mr. Burns?" is the only two-part episode of The Simpsons to date. Part one is the twenty-fifth and final episode of the sixth season and originally aired on the Fox network on May 21, 1995. Part two is the season premiere of the seventh season and originally aired on September 17, 1995.

Springfield Elementary School strikes oil, but Mr. Burns steals it and at the same time brings misery to many of Springfield's citizens. The first part has a cliffhanger ending where Mr. Burns is shot by an unidentified assailant. In the second part, Springfield's police try to find the culprit, with their main suspects being Waylon Smithers and Homer Simpson. The culprit turns out to be Maggie Simpson.

Both episodes were written by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein; the first part was directed by Jeffrey Lynch and the second by Wes Archer. Musician Tito Puente guest stars as himself in both parts.

"Who Shot Mr. Burns?" was conceived by series creator Matt Groening and the writing staff decided to turn it into a two-part mystery episode. The first part contains several clues about the identity of the culprit because the writers wanted it to be solvable. In the months following the airing of part one, there was much widespread debate among fans of the series as to who actually shot Mr. Burns. The show mimicked the controversy that had resulted when the character J. R. Ewing was shot on the series Dallas in the episode titled "A House Divided", known by most as "Who shot J. R.?". Over the summer of 1995, Fox offered a contest to tie in with the mystery (sponsored by 1-800-COLLECT). It was one of the first contests to tie together elements of television and the Internet.

War is an organized, armed, and often a prolonged conflict that is carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities, and therefore is defined as a form of political violence. The set of techniques used by a group to carry out war is known as warfare. An absence of war (and other violence) is usually called peace.

In 2003, Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley identified war as the sixth (of ten) biggest problems facing the society of mankind for the next fifty years. In the 1832 treatise On War, Prussian military general and theoretician Carl von Clausewitz defined war as follows: "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will."

While some scholars see warfare as an inescapable and integral aspect of human culture, others argue that it is only inevitable under certain socio-cultural or ecological circumstances. Some scholars argue that the practice of war is not linked to any single type of political organization or society. Rather, as discussed by John Keegan in his History of Warfare, war is a universal phenomenon whose form and scope is defined by the society that wages it. Another argument suggests that since there are human societies in which warfare does not exist, humans may not be naturally disposed for warfare, which emerges under particular circumstances. The ever changing technologies and potentials of war extend along a historical continuum. At the one end lies the endemic warfare of the Paleolithic^{[citation needed]} with its stones and clubs, and the naturally limited loss of life associated with the use of such weapons. Found at the other end of this continuum is nuclear warfare, along with the recently developed possible outcome of its use, namely the potential risk of the complete extinction of the human species.