By Steve BermanOn Wednesday, as a rally at Union Station in Kansas City celebrating the Chiefs repeat Super Bowl victory ended, someone, or someones, shot at least 21 people, killing at least one. This occurred within sight of the main stage that was the focus of the event. At this hour, the media doesn’t know much else about what happened, other than carnage.
Motive: unknown. Shooter(s): unknown. Three suspects have been taken into custody. KCPD Chief Stacey Graves asked the public to provide video or information that could help the investigation. Police are still trying to count the number of rounds fired.
One thing seems evident: a large number of rounds were fired into a crowd in a very short time. This would indicate a high capacity magazine in a semi-automatic weapon capable of a rapid rate of fire. Or, it could indicate more than one shooter and more than one weapon. We just don’t know yet.
“Parades, rallies, schools, movies. It seems like almost nothing is safe,” said Mayor Quinton Lewis, who attended the rally along with Missouri Gov. Mike Parson. No members of the Chiefs team was injured as the team departed on buses before the shooting started.
Mayor Lewis is correct, in the sense that people with murderous intent can find ways to perpetrate their evil act. But in another sense, it’s the mayor’s responsibility to ensure that large public events are safe in his city. The KCPD had over 800 officers covering the rally. The fact that a shooting occurred—a mass shooting—is a failure for the department.
Kansas City has had difficulty with its police and crime. In June 2023, KMBC News, the local ABC affiliate, reported that KCPD staffing was at a “historic low” while homicide number increased.
According to Fraternal Order of Police President Brad Lemon, there are currently 284 unfilled police officer positions for KCPD.
Additionally, half of homicide cases so far this year are unsolved.
It’s unclear how an event attended by the city mayor, the state governor, all kinds of local celebrities, and the reigning Super Bowl champs could allow one or more individuals to enter with the kinds of weapons capable of this violence.
We don’t know if it was “senseless,” as the Chiefs said in a statement. It could very well have been targeted.
The deadliest mass shooting in American history is the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas in 2017. The FBI closed its investigation into the shooting in 2023, concluding that the motive could not be determined. What they did determine is the shooter, Stephen Paddock, meticulously planned it. We will never know the motive because Paddock kept shooting right up until police killed him in the act.
The second deadliest shooting was when Omar Mateen killed 49 at the Pulse nightclubin Orlando, Florida. The media initially reported a narrative, that Mateen chose Pulse because he was homophobic; that he was not religiously motivated; that he had too much unfettered access to guns; that he was an unstable man and a wife-beater. They got it totally wrong. The FBI added Mateen to its terrorist watch list in 2007, but he was removed when their investigations were closed. Mateen bought the weapons he used at Pulse in June, 2016, a week before the killings.
While Mateen was inside the nightclub, he called 911 at 2:35 a.m. and spoke of his “allegiance to Abu Bkr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.” He remained inside, texting his wife and following news coverage of the carnage until police killed him just after 5:00 a.m. We don’t know Mateen’s actual motive, because he was killed, but most evidence points to religious radicalism.
In Kansas City, we don’t know if the killer(s) are alive or not, but we must assume that they are since KCPD believes that they are either in custody or at large. The motive should emerge since the perpetrator is alive and can be questioned (at this point). It’s also not the first large public sports-related event to suffer violence.
In 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan detonated two pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Both brothers fled the scene. Three days later, Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police. Dzhokhar was wounded and taken into custody.
He later wrote notes to investigators detailing the preparations he and his brother made as they planned their attack. They were what law enforcement refers to as “lone wolf terrorists.” In 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik arrived at an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, and proceeded to spray bullets into the room. They obtained their weapons in an illegal straw purchase. The FBI treated the shooting as an act of terrorism. The shooters, again, planned their act.
I’m not saying that the shooting in Kansas City was terrorism, or done by a “lone wolf” (or more than one person). But we don’t know the motive yet, we don’t know the name(s) of the shooter(s). We should not make assumptions about the motives, planning or methods used.
We do know that the KCPD didn’t stop this, but we don’t know where that went wrong. The shooting might have been senseless, but it very well could have been planned.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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