Every year — on New Year’s Eve, July 4, when a sports team wins a championship — police and politicians practically beg people not to fire their guns into the air in celebration.
In Kansas City, reports of shots fired go up when the NFL playoffs roll around.
Meanwhile, a proposal to slightly strengthen the misdemeanor penalties for celebratory gunfire in Missouri can’t find its way into statute.
Democratic state Rep. Mark Sharp of Kansas City has tried for years to make the change with Blair’s Law, named for a Kansas City girl who lost her life from a bullet fired randomly skyward.
So he went to the team to tell its fans to leave weapons out of their celebrations.
“The Chiefs — whether they like it or not — they need to have a voice in this,” Sharp told The Beacon. “Two words: ‘Celebrate safely.’ That would go a long way to those same folks shooting their guns off after a Chiefs victory.”
Kansas City set a new record for homicides in 2023. Sharp contends a message from the team could play a role in reducing that number.
Sharp said his requests to the Chiefs have so far gone unanswered. Other lawmakers also think a word or two from the team might save a life.
Missouri House Majority Leader Jon Patterson, a Republican from Lee’s Summit, said it could be helpful for the team to weigh in.
Should the Chiefs join conversations about social issues?
The Kansas City Police Department’s ShotSpotter data says the number of shots fired was higher than the average evening when the Chiefs won playoff games last year. On Jan. 22, 2023, a Sunday night when the Chiefs did not play, the system recorded 15 rounds of gunfire.
The next Sunday, Jan. 29, 2023, when the Chiefs won the AFC Championship, the system counted 102 rounds. Two weeks later, when the team won the Super Bowl, the number went to 476 rounds.
In the past, KCPD and Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas have urged residents to refrain from celebratory gunfire during holidays and events.
“When you shoot your gun in the air, you don’t get to decide where that round goes,” said Sgt. Jake Becchina said during a 2021 press conference ahead of New Year’s Eve. “It will travel, sometimes as many as, if not over, a thousand yards.”
Sports teams and corporations have faced mounting pressures to weigh in on social issues over the past few years, according to Virginia Harrison, a communications professor and researcher at Clemson University.
“The NFL really have been ramping up their corporate social responsibility,” Harrison said. “So things like ‘don’t drink and drive’ that are not necessarily controversial, things they’re not going to get backlash on.”
Still, teams aren’t likely to go out on a limb with messages that could be seen as polarizing, especially when sports are seen as a form of entertainment that should avoid politicized topics.
“There is kind of a balance where we need to address things that are relevant to our fan base in Missouri and Kansas City,” Harrison said of how the Chiefs may view sensitive messaging. “But we can’t go too far in the sense that we’re going rogue almost, and then the NFL is going to take away our ownership or take away our team.”
Sharp said although the team tries to avoid political topics, it’s weighing in on things like sports betting, by backing an initiative petition to legalize it in Missouri and the politicking of their stadium location.
The Chiefs “really need to have a responsibility when it comes to the community,” Sharp said. “Folks spend their entire paycheck to go to these games. We have a dog in the fight. We want the city to be better. Having less crime only helps them in the long run.”
A Chiefs spokesperson declined to comment on whether the team planned to issue a statement on the lawmaker’s request for a statement on celebratory gunfire.
Could a message from the Kansas City Chiefs even make an impact?
Harrison’s research has shown that fans tend to respond more positively to social messages from players than from a team or a sports league. Messages that are authentic to a player’s brand are also more likely to be well-received by fans.
One of Harrison’s studies also showed that fans who are politically neutral or liberal-leaning tend to respond more favorably to messages concerning social issues. In contrast, the study found conservative-leaning fans viewed social activism by the NBA negatively.
A paper assessing fans’ responses to the NFL’s response during 2020 and the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing had similar conclusions.
“Perhaps the use of official team sources exacerbated negative responses because it violated fan’s identities and did not allow for easy dissociation from specific athletes,” the paper concluded.
Another forthcoming study from Evan Brody, a communications professor at the University of Nevada, found that when fans were presented with an NFL collaboration with an LGBTQ+ organization, some fans were initially angered by the collaboration, but not enough to renounce their teams.
“When we then ask them, ‘Is this going to change whether or not you support the NFL, purchasing tickets, watching games or purchasing gear?’ it did not have any effect on people’s willingness to continue to support the NFL,” Brody said.
There is also less risk for teams because fans are unlikely to start supporting a competitor based on these messages, unlike in the corporate world where issuing potentially polarizing messages could drive one’s consumers to the competition.
“You’re not gonna become a Raiders fan or a Broncos fan just because you’re mad at the team,” Brody said.
How would Blair’s Law impact celebratory gunfire?
The issue of celebratory gunfire itself is particularly difficult to pin down, according to Kelly Drane, the research director at Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The way a bullet travels and the often crowded public settings where celebratory gunfire occurs make it hard to track.
“We know anecdotally that it’s a problem because we see these cases,” Drane said. “But it’s hard to know just the full extent of the problem because of the difficulties and tracking this type of violence.”
Blair’s Law made it to Gov. Mike Parson’s desk last summer after passing both the House and the Senate as part of a larger public safety package of legislation. Under existing law, firing a gun within city limits with “criminal negligence” — that would include celebratory gunfire — is a misdemeanor with punishment of up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Blair’s Law would double the fine.
Parson has said he supports the change, but he vetoed the legislation last year because it was teamed with another bill he opposed.
Sharp acknowledged that using Blair’s Law to address celebratory gunfire was like “killing an ant with a sledgehammer.”
“I wish we didn’t have to legislate our way out of this,” he said. “But you have to go that far because of how much it hasn’t been policed.”
Drane said laws prohibiting guns from being carried in certain public locations can help with reducing rates of celebratory gunfire.
“If you think about large crowded areas, if people are firing bullets into the air, there’s an even higher risk that people could get hit,” she said.
She said laws that restrict access to guns for younger people or promote safe gun storage could also help reduce the rate of celebratory gunfire.
Drane said the most effective way to prevent crime is for residents to understand that they’ll inevitably be caught for doing so.
“One of the biggest deterrents to crime is knowing that punishment is swift and certain,” she said. “If people don’t think that there’s a high likelihood of being caught, there could be some benefits of just enforcement.”
The legislation is HB 1437, HB 1477 and SB 788.
This story was originally published by the Kansas City Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
