Laws wouldn’t have stopped KC Chiefs rally violence - and mass shootings are declining | Opinion

If ever an event were going to shock a community into action, it would be one shared by tens of thousands of people from all walks of life — one just like the mass shooting that killed Lisa Lopez-Galvan and injured 24 at the celebration of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory. But here we are months later and not much has changed.

As understandably unsatisfying as that is, restricting fundamental civil rights like gun ownership and use shouldn’t be done in a rush after a shocking event, nor should the rights of the law-abiding be held hostage to the worst among us.

A sign of a hurried and ineffective response is the Democratic legislative proposals in both Kansas and Missouri that would have done nothing to head off February’s tragic events at the station. Among the ideas that would have done nothing are “red flag” laws intended to get guns out of the hands of people with mentally illness and safe storage laws meant to keep guns under lock and key. No evidence points to mental health or storage issues as a cause of the gunfire at the Chiefs rally.

Other proposals might have done something — such as reviving permit requirements for concealed carry or allowing cities to have their own strict gun regulations, but even that is questionable. Among the dozen people who drew firearms in the bloody skirmish over unfriendly looks outside Union Station, at least half of them already face charges for violating what few state and federal laws that already regulate the sale and possession of guns.

It is a sure bet that those who ignore our current laws aren’t going to be suddenly pushed into compliance by passing more.

Perhaps the life-altering events at the rally might have resulted in more concerted action if Kansas City’s trauma were matched by a drumbeat of deadly events around the country that dramatized the danger of firearms, but that is not the case.

I talked to professor James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who tracks the deadliest mass killings in a database for USA Today. According to him, as of June 1, such deadly incidents have fallen by more than half, from 24 at this time in 2023 to only 11 so far this year.

Even by the measure favored by gun control groups, which track shootings that injure at least four people, but don’t necessarily kill anyone, such incidents are down this year by more than a quarter, he says. More than half of the mass shootings they track leave nobody dead, and as a result get little national coverage.

Fox calls it Newton’s Law of Crime Statistics: “What goes up, must come down. Just like the homicide rate more generally, spikes in mass shootings tend to be followed by corrective declines.”

What fuels the fear he says are journalists and activists who cite specific examples of mass death and then use gun control advocates’ mass shooting numbers to make it seem as if such things are common. “There really is no epidemic of mass killings; the epidemic is in the level of fear that is way out of proportion with the risk,” he told me.

Last year was the second year running that gun deaths fell according to the Gun Violence Archive most often cited by gun control groups. The biggest decline was in suicides. You know who is most likely to kill you with a gun? It is not some heavily armed teen in downtown Kansas City — it is you. Every year, there are thousands more gun suicides than there are gun murders.

But if you worry about mass shootings despite the reality that they’re not much of a threat, in our huge nation, there is always another one just around the corner. On Sunday morning, in Akron, Ohio, someone at a birthday party opened fire killing one person and wounding 24. Sound familiar?

It is why we’ll be having this debate next year and the year after until we die, most likely because of something other than a bullet.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com