On Wednesday, February 14, 2024, Kansas City’s Super Bowl victory parade and rally took a devastating turn as the celebration turned to mass gun violence. And now Missouri’s terrible governor is speaking up to let us know what he plans to do about it: absolutely nothing.
I’m not sure where the final numbers landed but about a million people were estimated to attend the parade. Of those, thousands gathered at the event’s end point of KC’s Union Station, where, immediately after the official rally ended, gunfire broke out, injuring at least 22 people (some reports put the number higher) and killing one person, local DJ and radio host Lisa Lopez-Galvan.
I can’t begin to imagine what the people at Union Station felt that day, but even just watching the events from the safety of my Kansas City home was a harrowing experience. The shooting started nearly the moment the rally ended, and viewers of the local news broadcast watched as the anchors—who had just spent the last few hours in silly, happy, celebratory mode and were getting ready to sign off—made the decision to stay on the scene and report on the shooting live as it unfolded. Watching live footage of the crowds was exasperating, as some people ran but most continued to roam casually, having no idea what was happening. (Kansas City is a huge fireworks town and nearly everyone who spoke to reporters said that’s what they thought the gunshots were.)
Making things even more devastating, this parade was such a massive deal to the people of Kansas City that schools were shut down for the day and the crowd was full of young children. Of the gunshot victims, half were children. The youngest victim is just six years old.
Amid this tragedy, Missouri Governor Mike Parson is speaking out and issuing strong words—for pretty much everyone and everything except guns.
In a radio interview Thursday, Parson blamed the shooting on “a bunch of criminals, thugs,” declaring, “What happened yesterday with those thugs is not who we are in Missouri.”
“You just got some absolutely—be careful what I say before I say something I’m gonna probably regret—but just a bunch of criminals, thugs out there, just killing people at an incident like that and attempting to kill all those people and created such chaos that people got hurt, being trampled,” Parson said Thursday. “I hope that prosecutors and judges and everybody understands how serious this is.”
According to The Kansas City Star, “Parson, during the interview, did not use the word ‘gun.’”
Despite what Parson says, this is absolutely who we are in Missouri—not because we’re bad people, but because of the one thing he won’t mention: guns. Missouri has one of the highest gun death rates in the U.S. and, not coincidentally if you have any modicum of common sense, some of the weakest gun laws in the country. While the laws in Kansas City are a bit stricter, in Missouri, background checks are not required to purchase a gun, gun owners aren’t required to register their guns, you do not need a permit to open or concealed carry and you do not even need to be 18 to do so.
Parson has long prided himself on governing a state that actively refuses to make people safer and says anyone who tries is “on notice.”
Not much is known about the multiple suspected shooters responsible for Wednesday’s tragedy. Three people have been detained but according to local police, this was not an act of planned terrorism, but was just a “dispute between several people that ended in gunfire.”
I’m still sorting through this emotional mess that’s filled my city, but I have to say, this somehow feels worse. If this were just some angry people—angry kids, really, as two of the suspects are under 18—getting in a fight, that means that if Parson and other Missouri Republicans weren’t so hell-bent on protecting guns instead of people, this would have been, at worst, a violent altercation between three people.
But because these politicians put their gun lobby cash cow above our lives and safety, a person is dead and many more—many children—have been wounded and traumatized. And we’re just expected to live like this.
(featured image: Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
