As the first reports of multiple casualties started rolling in at the end of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl rally on Feb. 14, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker feared police were dealing with a “traditional mass shooter” — someone bent on killing as many people as possible in the crowd.
Johnny Waller, a Kansas City activist with a shooting conviction in his past, heard the same news very differently.
“I thought it was a tragedy but not uncommon,” said Waller.
Waller served time for firing a handgun in a crowded shopping mall as a teenager and later for drug possession. Since his release, he’s earned a master’s degree and served as program manager for a UMKC Law School project that helps people clear their criminal records. He volunteers with other groups that help formerly incarcerated people find meaningful work.
Waller said mass shootings happen regularly in Kansas City, and what triggers them is usually a petty disagreement that ratchets up in an instant.
“If you pull a gun on my people, then we all gonna pull guns on you. And if you start shooting at one of my people, we’re going to have to start shooting at you. So, as soon as the first firearm is produced, then everyone who’s got a gun is going to produce a firearm and start shooting,” said Waller. “And so, that’s just how it goes.”
Police said that’s how it went at the Super Bowl victory rally. Prosecutors allege that the shooting started when 23-year-old Lyndell Mays got into an argument with a stranger and pulled a gun; they say 18-year-old Dominick Miller also pulled a gun and started shooting.
Two minors also face weapons charges. The gunfire killed Lisa Lopez-Galvan and injured almost two dozen others.
Kansas City's shooting falls under a broadly accepted definition of mass shooting because more than three people were injured. Eleven children were hit with bullets. It happened at a big public event that was being broadcast live on TV. But it’s not what a lot of people think of as a mass shooting.
“That’s different than somebody entering an elementary school with an AR-15 to kill as many kids as possible,” said Jillian Peterson, co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project, an organization that tracks and analyzes mass shootings.
Peterson said purposeful mass shootings — think Columbine, Uvalde, the Pulse nightclub — happen much more frequently than in previous decades. Paterson said that in a normal year, someone will carry out this type of attack half a dozen times in the United States.
Much more common are mass shootings where at least four people are injured.
“The vast majority of those are escalations of dispute exactly like we saw in Kansas City,” said Peterson. “So fights that escalate because people are armed where they weren't planning on — they didn't wake up thinking, 'I'm gonna commit murder today.'”
Shootings with four or more injuries happened 656 times in the United States last year. That's pretty close to two a day, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Five of those shootings were in Kansas City.
Peterson said easy access to firearms drives up mass shooting numbers.
That may have been true with the Super Bowl rally shooting.
Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said odds are there were lots of guns at the celebration, and that minors were carrying some of them. And she said there’s a reason for that: Missouri law.
Baker said people carrying pistols, shotguns and high-powered rifles into the big, dense crowd that day were completely within their rights under state statute. Almost everyone in Missouri, other than convicted felons, is allowed to pack heat. Even children.
“A juvenile is allowed to possess a weapon concealed or not, like on his back or in his pants,” said Baker. “And it can be a long gun, it can be an assault rifle. It just can’t be fully automatic.”
Baker said it’s been this way since 2017, when Missouri got rid of most restrictions on carrying weapons. She said state law makes it almost impossible for police to stop shootings.
“The point that officers can really intervene, is when the gun comes up and it’s drawn, and it’s being pointed in an angry and threatening manner,” said Baker. “The problem is that at the point I draw and I point there’s not enough time, the trigger pull is probably already happening.”
