Police arrested two armed people after the shootings that took place near the parking lot of Union Station in Kansas City, police said on X (formerly Twitter). A man wearing a red jogging suit is among those arrested, according to AFP journalists.
The injured were placed on stretchers by emergency services, the same source reported. Law enforcement officers were deployed in large numbers at the scene, protected by yellow cordons characteristic of crime scenes in the United States.
Shooting during the Super Bowl parade in Kansas City on Wednesday 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.
Tens of thousands of people celebrated the Chiefs on Wednesday, 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. 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.
49,000 gunshot deaths in 2021 in the country
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 in three adults owns at least one weapon and almost one in two adults 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. Around 49,000 people died from gunfire 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.
No anti-gun laws in the United States
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 a psycho 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.