Kansas City Super Bowl parade shooting is the nation’s new brand of terror

By one widely accepted definition, the gunfire that killed one person, wounded 22 others and ruined the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory celebration on Wednesday does not qualify as a “mass shooting.” Not enough people died.

So common is random gun violence in the United States that we must distinguish between those shootings that were merely deadly and those in which four or more people lost their lives. Let’s hope that the wounded recover, and the Kansas City killing can continue to be classified among the merely mundane, everyday horrors that are now incorporated into the American way of life.

But that classification doesn’t do justice to this ever more frequent American phenomenon in which gunfire turns the joy of celebrants into terror.

Initial reports suggest that a private dispute, and not politics or ideology, led to the gunfire in Kansas City, so it was not an act of terrorism by the common definition that makes us think of hijacked airplanes and the 9/11 attacks. It appears to have had no political motivation of the sort that led to the 2015 Christmas party massacre by homegrown Islamic extremists in San Bernardino, or the white supremacist slaughters of Black people in a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015, a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in 2022, a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2023, and countless other shootings in which people were targeted for their race, religion or politics.