There's nothing more American than football ... and a mass shooting
Two of the things Americans love the most — football and guns — converged earlier this month to add more victims to the ticker tape of mass shootings.
In what is increasingly becoming the rule rather than the exception, a joyous parade to celebrate the Kansas City Chiefs' fourth Super Bowl win ended in a hail of bullets.
Lisa Lopez-Galvan has no business being dead, and the 21 others — including several children — should not be recovering from their gunshot wounds.
Two adults and two teenagers have been arrested and charged.
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Though the event had more than 800 police officers on duty, they couldn't prevent it; not because they were incompetent, but because you can't wrestle a culture to the ground.
Americans are at risk because of an ideology which considers bringing a gun to a party as perfectly normal behavior.
A pathology that deems it necessary to bring a gun to a parade also sees nothing wrong with shooting up the most innocuous of places, be it a synagogue, a birthday party, a Christmas tree lighting or a grocery store.
It requires a train of thought that believes fear is the same thing as respect, and that every conflict can be solved with a bullet.
It produces a kind of moral triangulation which enables some people to step over the bodies of dead second graders to argue that the right to own a weapon of war supersedes an 8-year-old's right to come home from school in one piece.
When a mass shooting occurs, there's an immediate tendency to wonder aloud if it were an act of terror.
But the problem is not some faceless, fanatical foreigner.
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No one from Iran is firing the ricocheted bullets that are killing 5-year-olds asleep in their beds in Chicago, or grandmothers walking down the street.
The people shopping for groceries in Buffalo, and those dancing at a outdoor concert in Las Vegas didn't die at the hands of Boko Haram.
It is us. It is always us.
Everytown for Gun Safety notes 19,000 people have been shot to death or wounded in a mass shooting (defined as four or more victims) between 2015 and 2022.
In 2022, we saw 644 mass shootings. That figure rose to 656 in 2023, according to a Gun Violence Archive report.
Around the world, people die everyday at the hands of another wielding a gun. But America stands alone in our propensity for mass shootings of our fellow citizens.
Gunshot wounds have surpassed traffic accidents as the No. 1 cause of death for American children.
By the time you read this, more mass shootings will have occurred, and the story in Kansas City will have passed its shelf life; the shock and outrage faded, the thoughts and prayers have gone stale.
As the bodies pile up.
Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Americans love football ... and mass shootings | Opinion
