What if Patrick Mahomes had been shot? K.C. tragedy latest reminder of America’s gun epidemic | Opinion
Kansas City’s celebration of itself and its champion Chiefs was winding down at storied Union Station. The day was idyllic, sun bright, air crisp, temperature in the 60s. Then came that popping sound, the one you might first mistake for fireworks, until the screaming starts.
Panicked moments later amid a terrified stampede Super Bowl-winning Chiefs coach Andy Reid knelt to comfort a teenager who had been shot.
“Please breathe,” he told the boy.
It happened on Main Street. It can happen anywhere. It can happen everywhere.
Because this is America.
“Parades, rallies, schools, movies,” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. “It seems like almost nothing is safe. That’s what happens with guns.”
It is mid-February and there already have been more mass shootings in 2024 than there have been days in the year. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation says homicides by gun violence proportionally are nearly 20 times higher here than the average of other developed countries.
Welcome to the United States of America. Now run for your lives!
I hesitated to write this column. I needed to, because the disheartened anger I feel for what the country I love has let itself become needed a vent, someplace to go. The reason I hesitated is that the mass shooting in K.C. happened on Wednesday, and by the time you read this a couple of days later the tragedy might already be filed away as old news.
It seems part of our national defense mechanism is to desensitize ourselves and give the latest mass shooting a minimal shelf life before we go on with out lives and quietly await the next mass shooting.
Imagine that? What we have become? There is another mass shooting in America, one of (too many to count) in the past (whatever time frame you wish), and we Americans take a knee -- not in reverence, but in resignation, in helpless, defeated acceptance that this somehow is now the new normal and a part of life.
Thoughts and prayers, right?
Thoughts, prayers and zero answers for an American gun culture egregiously out of control.
Mass shootings can happen due to domestic terrorism or extremism. They can be rooted in mental illness or hatred. Sometimes they are blamed on a personal dispute, as in Kansas City, where two suspects have been detained, both juveniles. The common denominator is the gun, often an assault rifle the founding fathers could never have imagined in the day of the musket when the Second Amendment was written.
And what motivated the madness doesn’t make the ache any less when a family is burying a loved one for the most sudden and senseless of reasons.
Lisa Lopez-Galvan, 43, mother f two, huge Chiefs fan, prominent D.J. at a Kansas City radio station, was killed Wednesday while celebrating her team’s third Super Bowl in in five years. Twenty-two others were injured, three of them critically and still fighting for their lives. Half of the gunshots victims were kids ages 8 to 15.
Some scars heal. Some you can’t see, and you carry forever.
What if Andy Reid or Patrick Mahomes had been hit in the spray of bullets on Wednesday? Would that have gotten our attention?
President Joe Biden: “It’s time for Congress to finally act to ban assault weapons, limit high-capacity magazines, strengthen background checks, and keep guns out of the hands of those who have no business owning them. How many more families need to be torn apart?”
Copy and paste. We have heard it all before.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline the day after the latest tragedy: ‘Missouri GOP leaders dismiss calls for tougher gun laws after KC shooting.’
Your government in inaction. Your tax dollars doing nothing. The proliferation of military-grade assault weapons and mass shootings go on unchecked because too many of your elected officials are a bunch of whores in suits, beholden to the powerful gun lobby, not to the people they ostensibly represent.
I fully understand half of you probably disagree with me and may be shouting “Stick to sports!” because we cannot have a rational conversation about gun control, let alone reach any sort of sane compromise.
If Reid or Mahomes had been shot ... would that make it a “sports story?”
Other journalists once called Sports the “toy department.” And I would stick to sports, if “sportswriter” was how I identified. Instead I am first an American citizen who is worried about the country my 6-year-old granddaughter will grow up in.
I also understand every call for gun control and an assault weapon ban is seen by some as Second Amendment infringement and a curtailment of your “rights.” Crazy thought: Your right to own an assault weapon is not greater than Lisa Lopez-Galvan’s right to not be murdered by one.
The right to bear arms was written with handguns for home protection and hunting rifles in mind, not meant to be limitless and included rapid-fire killing machines.
What has become of America now permeates everyday life. Many of us have an inner voice now warning us to be hyper-vigilant in public places, in large gatherings of any kind. On my life, the thought occurred to me in my weekly bowling league this past Wednesday, the night of the K.C. massacre: My team had been assigned lane number three, right near the main door where the lunatic with the assault weapon would burst through shooting.
The fear of a mass shooting is no way to live, or to die, but is has become our way of life, and death.
The day after the latest tragedy in the American epidemic we choose to do nothing about, Union Station workers had positioned dozens of folding chairs out front to spell KC STRONG.
It happened to be Kansas City this time, at a celebration of a Super Bowl win.
Now the roulette wheel is spinning again and will be until we decide to stop it.
What city will be next?
