Young Victims, Young Suspects: The Kansas City Shooting and Gun Violence

After the shooting in Kansas City this week at a parade to celebrate the Super Bowl victory of the hometown Chiefs, children who had been struck by gunfire flooded into Children’s Mercy Hospital, less than a mile from Union Station, where the shooting occurred.

“Fear,” the hospital’s chief nursing officer, Stephanie Meyer, told reporters. “The one word I would use to describe what we saw and how they felt when they came to us was fear.”

On the other side of the guns were young people, too, according to the authorities who said on Friday that two teenagers detained in the aftermath of the shooting had been charged with “gun-related” offenses and with resisting arrest.

What had seemed like an attack on the parade itself turned out to be a far more common act of American violence: a dispute that ended in gunfire, and in this case, left one person dead and 22 people injured, about half of them younger than 16.

The shooting was news around the world because of when and where it unfolded. But in many respects, the circumstances were all too familiar in a country where guns and gun violence are pervasive