At least one person died and nine others were injured in shootings Wednesday during the parade in Kansas City celebrating the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory, firefighters in this city in Missouri, in the central United States, said.
Among the nine injured, three are in critical condition and five others in serious condition, said a fire department spokesperson.
According to Kansas City police, the shooting took place near the Union Station parking lot and two people were arrested. A man wearing a red jogging suit is among those arrested, according to AFP journalists.
The injured had been placed on stretchers by the emergency services, noted this same source.
Shots were fired west of Union Station near the garage and multiple people were struck. We took two armed people into custody for further investigation.
— kcpolice (@kcpolice) February 14, 2024
“I thought they were fireworks,” John O’Connor told the daily The Kansas City Starexplaining having heard “between 15 and 20 shots in a short period of time”.
Law enforcement officers were deployed in large numbers at the scene, protected by yellow cordons characteristic of crime scenes in the United States.
Patrick Mahomes, the star quarterback of the Chiefs, said “pray for Kansas City” in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
The traditional line of double-decker buses moved up Grand Boulevard toward the old Union Station, where the shooting took place as the parade drew to a close.
Tens of thousands of people celebrated the Chiefs on Wednesday, who marched through the streets of Kansas City to celebrate their victory on Sunday in the Super Bowl, the annual high mass of American football.
Proliferation
The United States is paying a very heavy price for the spread of firearms on its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them.
The country has more individual weapons than inhabitants: one in three adults owns at least one weapon and almost one in two adults lives in a home where there is a weapon.
The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of firearm deaths in the United States, incomparable to that of other developed countries.
About 49,000 people died from gunfire in 2021, compared to 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year. This represents more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.
However, it is the mass shootings that stand out the most, while illustrating the ideological divide separating conservatives and progressives on the question of how to prevent such tragedies.
Recent American history is indeed punctuated by killings, with no place in daily life seeming safe, from the business to the church, from the supermarket to the discotheque, from the public highway to public transport. common.
Among all these massacres, some perpetrated in schools particularly shocked public opinion, such as that perpetrated in 2012 by a psycho in an elementary school in Connecticut, during which 20 children aged 6 and 7 were killed.
The United States Congress has not adopted ambitious legislation, with many elected officials being under the influence of the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), the leading American arms lobby.
In fact, in a country where the possibility of owning a firearm is considered by millions of Americans as a fundamental constitutional right, the only recent legislative advances remain marginal, such as the generalization of criminal and psychiatric background checks above all. purchase of weapon.