A Game, a Parade, a Shooting: The Story of America in Three Acts

America’s most communal cultural event, the Super Bowl, featured a wildly popular team from Kansas City cheered by a global pop star who is dating the tight end. After the Chiefs won, she kissed her boyfriend under the falling confetti.

Three days later, the city held a massive parade and celebration where gunfire broke out, scattering panicked fans in football jerseys, killing a woman and hurting 22 others, about half of them kids.

Super Bowl. Parade. Shooting.

Is there a more American story than that?

The shooting was not directly related to football, in the way that a shooting at a mall is not related to shopping. But every such shooting feels like a crime against American culture. Settings have included schools, colleges, movie theaters, churches and synagogues, grocery stores, concerts. There is now a subset of mass shootings occurring at parades.

No parcel of American public life feels completely safe. No shooting feels like a surprise, except to the people who live through it.

This one was a coda to the global sporting event where we celebrate all things American — from football to Usher, military flyovers to the Puppy Bowl. What if a shooting happened at a massive hometown celebration of the champions, in a crowd of people wearing team gear? It felt like an unoriginal plot device. But deadly shootings happen so regularly in the United States that only the wildest circumstances bring attention.