Kansas city Penalties And Consequences Should They Win The Super Bowl With Wide Celebrations..
As the Kansas City Chiefs get ready for a Super Bowl appearance with the San Francisco 49ers on Feb. 11, Missouri lawmakers advanced a measure to raise the penalty for shooting a gun skyward in celebration.
Kansas City saw more celebratory gunfire on Sunday — an increase from when the Chiefs won the AFC championship a year earlier.
One Kansas City lawmaker who is sponsoring a version of the bill has called on the Chiefs to urge fans to refrain from firing their guns into the sky. Democratic Rep. Mark Sharp said his request has gone unanswered by the team.
Celebratory gunfire poses a problem for law enforcement and communities after big events, especially major holidays like New Year’s Eve or July 4. But in recent years as the Chiefs have consistently had playoff successes, Kansas Citians increasingly point their firearms at the sky and shoot.
The Kansas City Police Department says the gunshot detection service ShotSpotter shows the problem getting worse.
In 2023, when the Chiefs won the divisional round playoff game, ShotSpotter recorded 33 rounds.
This year, the detection system recorded 147 rounds. When the Chiefs won the AFC championship in 2023, it recorded 102 rounds. This week, that number rose to 130 rounds.
In 2023, Kansas City broke its homicide record with 182 homicides recorded across the city.
But homicides aren’t the only measure of consequences from gunfire, celebratory or not, said Tom Chittum, the current senior vice president at SoundThinking, the company that runs the ShotSpotter system.
We often use homicide as a measure of violent crime, but it is a very imprecise measure,” Chittum said. “Murders don’t often go undiscovered and they’re very easy to count. But the fact of the matter is the consequences of gun violence go so far beyond homicides.”