Shooting during the Super Bowl parade in Kansas City on Wednesday February 14 left at least one dead and nine injured, said a fire official in this city in Missouri, in the central United States.
Three of the injured are in critical condition and five others in serious condition, he told AFP.
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.
"I thought it was fireworks," John O'Connor told The Kansas City Star, explaining that he 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.
Tens of thousands of people celebrated the Chiefs, who paraded through the streets of Kansas City to celebrate their victory on Sunday in the Super Bowl, the annual high mass of American football.
Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes said "pray for Kansas City" in a post on X.
Praying for Kansas City… 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
— Patrick Mahomes II (@PatrickMahomes) February 14, 2024
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.
Spread of firearms
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 adult in three owns at least one weapon and nearly one adult in two 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 gunshots 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 an insane person 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.
With AFP
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