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America’s most communal cultural occasion, the Tremendous Bowl, featured a wildly fashionable group from Kansas Metropolis cheered by a world pop star who’s courting the tight finish. After the Chiefs received, she kissed her boyfriend below the falling confetti.
Three days later, town held a large parade and celebration the place gunfire broke out, scattering panicked followers in soccer jerseys, killing a girl and hurting 22 others, about half of them youngsters.
Tremendous Bowl. Parade. Taking pictures.
Is there a extra American story than that?
The taking pictures was in a roundabout way associated to soccer, in the way in which {that a} taking pictures at a mall will not be associated to procuring. However each such taking pictures appears like against the law towards American tradition. Settings have included faculties, schools, film theaters, church buildings and synagogues, grocery shops, live shows. There may be now a subset of mass shootings occurring at parades.
No parcel of American public life feels fully secure. No taking pictures appears like a shock, besides to the individuals who dwell by means of it.
This one was a coda to the worldwide sporting occasion the place we rejoice all issues American — from soccer to Usher, navy flyovers to the Pet Bowl. What if a taking pictures occurred at a large hometown celebration of the champions, in a crowd of individuals carrying group gear? It felt like an unoriginal plot system. However lethal shootings occur so repeatedly in the US 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 a bit of boy. It was luck that the demise toll was not increased.
“One of many cultural issues is that we’re shedding the flexibility to be in neighborhood with each other,” mentioned 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 not safely collect and rejoice, 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 exterior Union Station for the celebration, alongside along with his spouse, two grown granddaughters and several other others.
They have been ushered inside and bought separated within the chaos. Panicked folks rushed the doorways. Individuals hid for about half-hour, quietly and with telephones silenced, the way in which American kids at the moment are taught in faculties.
“You all the time wish to placed on one of the best present to your metropolis, at a time when lots of people have eyes on you,” White mentioned. “And you are taking satisfaction 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 satisfaction, however on the similar 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 the US, in accordance with the Gun Violence Archive. (The archive defines them as shootings during which no less than 4 individuals are killed or harm, not together with the shooter.)
The Kansas Metropolis taking pictures raised acquainted questions in regards to the intersection of American sports activities and tradition. Are sports activities occasions, and the parades that commemorate them, a spot to neglect the actual 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 staff 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 mentioned. “Perhaps music. And, after all, baseball was on the forefront of that galvanization.”
Soccer could also be on the forefront immediately. And when it binds folks collectively, in Kansas Metropolis and around the globe, it appears like Sunday’s Tremendous Bowl, or like Wednesday’s parade, earlier than the taking pictures started.
“And now it raises the problem of gun legal guidelines once more, significantly on this state, and systematic points that each metropolis has to cope with,” Kendrick mentioned. “It simply makes you concentrate on issues that you must take into consideration, anyway, however you don’t essentially wish to take into consideration, significantly in that second.”
Joe Posnanski, an writer 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 are 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 means of.
“The truth 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 mentioned. “However, inevitably, one thing occurs and that wall comes crashing down. There’s no option to defend that feeling from the surface world. That’s the fact of the place we’re.”
The Tremendous Bowl is the last word American distraction from the surface world. An estimated 123 million folks in the US 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 exterior world, with their sprawling, unsecured crowds. In Denver final June, two folks have been shot close to the top 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 area injured no less than 10.
Wednesday in Kansas Metropolis was a day of heat sunshine. Police estimated that one million folks got here to cheer the Chiefs, most of them in group colours. Faculties had been canceled for the event — a “crimson snow day.” Followers hung from timber and lightweight poles. About 850 law enforcement officials have been sprinkled round downtown.
The Kansas Metropolis Star referred to as it “the most important celebration in Kansas Metropolis’s historical past.”
There have been speeches, music, cheering. The Chiefs left the stage. Crew buses have been parked behind Union Station.
Then got here one other acquainted American ritual: frightened folks operating from a hazard they will’t pinpoint.
“All of us begin to grow to be members of this membership that none of us wish to be part of,” mentioned 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 helpful participant of the Tremendous Bowl victory over San Francisco, wrote on the social platform X. He added three prayer fingers emojis. It will have been unusual if he had mentioned nothing. It will have been newsworthy if he had mentioned extra. Mahomes and his spouse, Brittany, visited younger victims at a hospital on Friday.
The N.F.L. issued an announcement 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. The town was surging with satisfaction, he mentioned, with the Chiefs, Taylor Swift and the information that Arrowhead Stadium, dwelling of the soccer group, could 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 folks right here, together with myself, have ever come near experiencing,” Kander mentioned. “That transfers to the way in which that you simply really feel about your self.”
The parade was not nearly a soccer recreation. 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 appeared like a postgame parking zone after a giant recreation, lined with trash and discarded bottles.
Nevertheless it 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 crimson and gold confetti that showered folks there to rejoice all these good issues of the previous few days.
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