America’s most communal cultural occasion, the Tremendous Bowl, featured a wildly standard group from Kansas Metropolis cheered by a world pop star who’s relationship the tight finish. After the Chiefs received, she kissed her boyfriend underneath the falling confetti.
Three days later, town held an enormous parade and celebration the place gunfire broke out, scattering panicked followers in soccer jerseys, killing a lady and hurting 22 others, about half of them youngsters.
Tremendous Bowl. Parade. Capturing.
Is there a extra American story than that?
The taking pictures was in a roundabout way associated to soccer, in the best way {that a} taking pictures at a mall just isn’t associated to buying. However each such taking pictures looks like against the law in opposition to American tradition. Settings have included faculties, faculties, film theaters, church buildings and synagogues, grocery shops, concert events. There’s now a subset of mass shootings occurring at parades.
No parcel of American public life feels utterly protected. No taking pictures looks like a shock, besides to the individuals who dwell by it.
This one was a coda to the worldwide sporting occasion the place we have fun all issues American — from soccer to Usher, navy flyovers to the Pet Bowl. What if a taking pictures occurred at an enormous hometown celebration of the champions, in a crowd of individuals carrying group gear? It felt like an unoriginal plot machine. However lethal shootings occur so often in america that solely the wildest circumstances carry consideration.
Chiefs gamers have been close by. Some have been rushed away. One, offensive lineman Trey Smith, described being squeezed right into a closet, hiding whereas attempting to calm slightly boy. It was luck that the loss of life toll was not increased.
“One of many cultural issues is that we’re shedding the power to be in neighborhood with each other,” stated Jason Kander, a fifth-generation Kansas Metropolis resident, a Democratic former Missouri secretary of state and an advocate for tighter gun legal guidelines. “And after we can’t safely collect and have fun, it’s solely going to exacerbate the issue.”
That’s the concern of Frank White, a Democrat and the elected county govt of Jackson County (which incorporates Kansas Metropolis) who performed 18 seasons with baseball’s Kansas Metropolis Royals. He rode within the parade and was onstage outdoors Union Station for the celebration, alongside along with his spouse, two grown granddaughters and a number of other others.
They have been ushered inside and received separated within the chaos. Panicked individuals rushed the doorways. Individuals hid for about half-hour, quietly and with telephones silenced, the best way American youngsters are actually taught in faculties.
“You all the time need to placed on the perfect present on your metropolis, at a time when lots of people have eyes on you,” White stated. “And you’re taking pleasure in your metropolis not being a part of a mass taking pictures like this. So it was discouraging. It’s about showcasing your metropolis and your civic pleasure, however on the identical time, you’re pissed off as a result of gun violence across the nation is simply uncontrolled.”
Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, the sixth anniversary of the taking pictures that killed 17 at a Parkland, Fla., highschool. It was additionally the forty fifth day of 2024, and by that evening, there had been 49 mass shootings in america, in line with the Gun Violence Archive. (The archive defines them as shootings by which a minimum of 4 persons are killed or damage, not together with the shooter.)
The Kansas Metropolis taking pictures raised acquainted questions concerning the intersection of American sports activities and tradition. Are sports activities occasions, and the parades that commemorate them, a spot to overlook the true world, or expertise it?
Bob Kendrick is the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas Metropolis, Mo. His 12-year-old granddaughter and a number of the museum’s workers attended the parade.
He is aware of greater than most that sports activities all the time have been a prism for problems with race, gender, equity, economics, violence. When discussing the taking pictures, Kendrick invoked Buck O’Neil speaking about Jackie Robinson’s turning into the primary Black participant in baseball’s main leagues. It was a sports activities second, but additionally way over that. Individuals got here to video games simply to boo Robinson, O’Neil would say. They weren’t baseball followers. The nation had — has — points to confront, all the time.
“There are few issues in our society that impress as a lot as sport,” Kendrick stated. “Possibly music. And, in fact, baseball was on the forefront of that galvanization.”
Soccer could also be on the forefront at this time. And when it binds individuals collectively, in Kansas Metropolis and world wide, it looks like Sunday’s Tremendous Bowl, or like Wednesday’s parade, earlier than the taking pictures started.
“And now it raises the difficulty of gun legal guidelines once more, significantly on this state, and systematic points that each metropolis has to cope with,” Kendrick stated. “It simply makes you consider issues that it is best to take into consideration, anyway, however you don’t essentially need to take into consideration, significantly in that second.”
Joe Posnanski, an creator of best-selling sports activities books, spent 15 years as a columnist for the Kansas Metropolis Star. He is aware of the dueling views which can be thrust upon sports activities. Some need the video games to be an escape from life’s laborious realities, devoid of politics and off-field acrimony. Others see sports activities as a mirrored image of what the nation goes by.
“The fact is we might attempt to keep on this planet of sports activities and attempt to have them be a form of beacon that may carry us collectively,” Posnanski stated. “However, inevitably, one thing occurs and that wall comes crashing down. There’s no solution to shield that feeling from the skin world. That’s the truth of the place we’re.”
The Tremendous Bowl is the final word American distraction from the skin world. An estimated 123 million individuals in america watched, whether or not to root for a group, to see the commercials or to identify Taylor Swift, the worldwide music icon and girlfriend of Travis Kelce, Kansas Metropolis’s star tight finish.
Victory parades are a distraction planted within the outdoors world, with their sprawling, unsecured crowds. In Denver final June, two individuals have been shot close to the tip of the championship parade for the N.B.A.’s Nuggets. Days earlier, when the Nuggets received the title, a taking pictures close to the group’s enviornment injured a minimum of 10.
Wednesday in Kansas Metropolis was a day of heat sunshine. Police estimated that 1,000,000 individuals got here to cheer the Chiefs, most of them in group colours. Colleges had been canceled for the event — a “pink snow day.” Followers hung from timber and lightweight poles. About 850 cops have been sprinkled round downtown.
The Kansas Metropolis Star known as it “the most important celebration in Kansas Metropolis’s historical past.”
There have been speeches, music, cheering. The Chiefs left the stage. Workforce buses have been parked behind Union Station.
Then got here one other acquainted American ritual: frightened individuals operating from a hazard they’ll’t pinpoint.
“All of us begin to develop into members of this membership that none of us need to be part of,” stated Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas Metropolis, who was on the parade along with his spouse and mom.
A 43-year-old named Elizabeth Galvan, also called Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was killed, and 22 others, ages 8 to 47, have been injured. Two youngsters have been in custody.
Then got here the ritualistic responses, the choices of ideas and prayers, the pleas for gun reforms, the rhetorical questions on how a lot is sufficient and why this appears to be such a uniquely American downside.
“Praying for Kansas Metropolis,” Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, essentially the most invaluable participant of the Tremendous Bowl victory over San Francisco, wrote on the social platform X. He added three prayer fingers emojis. It could have been unusual if he had stated nothing. It could have been newsworthy if he had stated extra. Mahomes and his spouse, Brittany, visited younger victims at a hospital on Friday.
The N.F.L. issued a press release on Wednesday, three sentences of acquainted post-tragedy boilerplate noting that “we’re deeply saddened by the mindless taking pictures.”
Others in soccer, like Chiefs security Justin Reid, pleaded for “actual options.”
What bothers Kander, past the tragedy and the numbing repetition of gun violence, is what the taking pictures means for Kansas Metropolis. Town was surging with pleasure, he stated, with the Chiefs, Taylor Swift and the information that Arrowhead Stadium, dwelling of the soccer group, can be a website of World Cup soccer video games in 2026.
“Kansas Metropolis has felt like the middle of the universe, and that’s not one thing that individuals right here, together with myself, have ever come near experiencing,” Kander stated. “That transfers to the best way that you simply really feel about your self.”
The parade was not nearly a soccer sport. It was greater than that — a end result, a civic pronouncement.
After which the location of one other tragic taking pictures.
By Wednesday evening, the scene close to Union Station seemed like a postgame parking zone after an enormous sport, lined with trash and discarded bottles.
But it surely was additionally totally different. There have been deserted garments, garden chairs, strollers. There was police tape. And there have been tiny sq. items of colourful paper, the pink and gold confetti that showered individuals there to have fun all these good issues of the previous few days.
