One person was killed, and at least 20 injured, in a shooting following a post-Super Bowl rally in Kansas City meant to celebrate the city’s Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs. Eleven children were being treated for injuries at a children’s hospital, including nine with gunshot wounds, according to the New York Times.
The shooting took place Wednesday afternoon; police have detained multiple suspects. Officials have not yet shared a motive, and the identity of the suspects have not been released.
The shooting comes after a near-record number of mass shootings in 2023. No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021.
Despite that sheer carnage, however, the political debate over how to ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of people who may hurt themselves and others has long proved intractable. In 2022, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas — the deadliest school shooting since 2012.
But those narrow reforms clearly haven’t stopped America’s gun violence epidemic. The US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership has been so ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding that there’s no telling how many more people will die before federal lawmakers take further action. In that absence, many red states have loosened their gun laws over the last few years, rather than making it…
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