What Our Moral Panic Says About Us
What Our Moral Panic Says About Us
Kansas City's gun violence problems extend far beyond the horrific Super Bowl Parade mass shooting. What's behind the sudden wave of concern for victims of gun violence in Kansas City?
The good news is that firearm homicides were down overall in 2023 from the previous year. These reductions haven’t brought firearm deaths below pre-pandemic levels and were unevenly distributed, but this is welcome news for hundreds of communities. Cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Minneapolis have reduced firearm violence by increasing homicide clearance rates, expanding violence intervention programs, and improving community-police relations.
Kansas City’s trajectory has been less encouraging. It remained one of the ten most violent large US cities in 2023. The graph below shows the Firearm Homicide Rate per 100,000 in Kansas City, Missouri, during the summer of 2023.
KC’s consistent ranking among the dozen or most violent US cities per capita and it’s steadily increasing homicide rate since 2017 just aren’t that newsworthy. They certainly aren’t worthy of moral panic.
This visualization shows annual firearm victim (not incident) counts in Kansas City from 2017-2023, including intentional injuries and fatalities and excluding accidents and suicides. Gun murders have increased every year in KC since 2017 except in 2021 over 2020. In 2022 and 2023 the murder rate increased again. Use the interactive link on the graph to see the counts for each year.
The preponderance of shootings in Kansas City are too routine to warrant heightened media attention, political activism, or outrage.
It’s therefore predictable that America’s elite institutions (i.e., The New York Times, Twitter, and Taylor Swift) reserve their moral panic about gun violence for public mass shootings occurring in broad daylight involving predominantly white, female, and/or young victims. Random acts of violence terrorize everyone. The protection of an army of police officers could not eliminate Travis Kelce’s risk of being shot in public while celebrating his Super Bowl victory. That’s our cue to acknowledge that gun violence, nationally and in Kansas City, is a problem. Run the presses!
There have been 27 “mass shootings” involving four or more victims in Kansas City since 2017. That’s a total of 162 mass shooting victims over seven years and fewer than two months. I created an interactive location map featuring all 27 mass shootings. Click on each site for incident characteristics including address and victim counts.
The two largest circles on the map represent the mass shootings with the highest overall victim counts:
The February 2024 Super Bowl Parade shooting, with 23 overall victims, including one fatality.
A January 2020 shooting outside the Ultra 9ine club in KC, with 16 victims including one fatality.
I don’t remember reading or hearing about this particular nightclub shooting, which is described as involving, “A gunman who opened fire outside of a Kansas City nightclub, killing a woman and injuring at least 15 other people before a guard killed him.”
To confirm my suspicion, I conducted a ProQuest search of the following five daily US newspapers during the month of January 2020 with the terms “Kansas City Nightclub Shooting.” This search looked for articles about this KC nightclub shooting in the following major US daily newspapers.
I located one result, to their credit, in the New York Times. (Note, they include the shooter in the death count while my count only includes his victims.)
This experiment can be repeated with any mass victim event involving a firearm in the US. The results are a mirror into our public consciousness. Compared to the KC Ultra 9ine nighclub shooting with its 16 innocent victims, the Super Bowl parade shooting with its 23 innocent victims has already received 68 times the amount of news coverage.
Understandably, we reserve our moral panic for only the most egregious mass shootings, usually those with high victim counts occurring in places that we least expect it. We don’t value the lives of “innocent victims” equally. Instead, we categorize victims of gun violence and mass shootings into two distinct groups: those with the right to live in a society where they can reasonably expect to be safe from their fellow citizens murdering and assaulting them with firearms, and those who lack such a right.
But how do we distinguish between these groups of victims? In Kansas City, Troost Avenue has served to demarcate the majority-black and majority-white parts of the city since redlining during the 1920s pushed lower-income black KC residents to the east of Troost Avenue. See the maps below, which show the high level of racial residential segregation that exists in Kansas City today. (Source: US Census Bureau & Wikipedia).
Troost Avenue is highlighted in red on that map. Now look again at the mass shooting map, this time with Troost Avenue highlighted in red.
What do most mass shootings in Kansas City have in common? And what don’t they share in common with the Super Bowl Parade mass shooting?
The answers to these questions make it clear: We don’t believe that the over 100 mass shooting victims who were shot on the east side of Troost Avenue had a right to be safe.
This is what our selective moral panic says about us.
Thanks for the reply. I'd love to know why you focus exclusively on injuries and homicides committed with firearms? I can think of some possible reasons, but it's easier to simply ask!
Sorry to be a pest, but I can't take an article too seriously if it's built around the term "gun violence" or "firearms violence." In my opinion those are not proper scholarly terms, rather they are propaganda terms that were invented to give people the impression that violence can be eliminated by passing repressive gun laws, which in reality serves a different agenda.
Crimes are committed by people, not guns. We will not reduce violence by focusing on the weapons used.
I believe the author actually knows this, as the third sentence suggests an honest assessment: "Cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Minneapolis have reduced firearm violence by increasing homicide clearance rates, expanding violence intervention programs, and improving community-police relations." Yay!
Other than that, the article makes a number of very valid points and is well worth reading.