The Kansas City Massacre, as it came to be known, had a crystallizing effect both here and in Washington, D.C. For the first time, FBI agents began to carry firearms and the federal government went to war against organized crime. By the end of the decade, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and Kansas City mob boss Johnny Lazia were dead. Chicago’s Al Capone was in prison, as was Kansas City’s corrupt political strongman Tom Pendergast — among others.
Would that Wednesday’s violence might be a similar catalyst here and in other cities where a particular problem is rampant and well known but the response has been entirely inadequate. The problem: young people, mostly boys, caught in a culture of violence, who use guns to settle their disputes.
This is not exactly the same dysfunction typically evoked by the words “mass shooting.” According to police, what appears to have happened at Kansas City’s Union Station on Wednesday was not a matter of one or two gunmen bent on indiscriminate murder. Instead, most or all of the 22 people shot (one fatally) were bystanders to a beef among reckless adolescents.
Such needless pain — at least 11 of the wounded were children, and the woman slain was a bright light of the community, the host of a radio program popular among lovers of “Tex-Mex” fusion music — saddened the city. And it curdled what has been a period of optimism among city boosters. Along with the exploits of the hometown football team, which was celebrating its third NFL championship in the past five years and basking in the attention of a certain music superstar, people have been buzzing about the new airport, a proposed city park in the heart of downtown, a possible baseball stadium beside the park, and various new or expanded museums — all as Kansas City prepares to host multiple games of the 2026 World Cup.
Though saddened and sickened, the city could not be surprised by the gunplay. Last month, in a shopping mall near Union Station, six people were wounded by bullets after an argument “quickly led to gunfire,” in the words of the Kansas City Star. Local prosecutors, that same week, charged a 21-year-old man in connection with a squabble turned deadly in a crowded nightclub district last summer. That incident happened within days of a gunfight outside a concert in the popular Power & Light District downtown, which was not far from the spot where the daughter of a prominent pastor was killed by a stray bullet at a monthly art fair in 2019.
This is just a sampling, far from a comprehensive list. And in fairness, the problem is hardly unique to this place. Bullets are flying around cities from coast to coast.
Last fall, I participated in a retreat with Kansas City business and civic leaders seeking answers to this madness. We heard from the writer Richard Rhodes, whose book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” is one of the great works of nonfiction of the 20th century. It grew from a lifelong interest in the problem of violence, rooted in his boyhood experience as a battered child.
Rhodes walked us through the conclusions of his 1999 book “Why They Kill,” a detailed examination of the process by which harmless children become people capable of firing off multiple rounds on a crowded street or parking lot. It starts with violence and threats of violence done to them. They are then encouraged to answer violence with violence. In the next step, usually between the ages of 9 and 12, they turn thoughts of violence into their first violent acts. Eventually, they become known for violence and enjoy the fear they instill.
It’s possible to intervene in that process and stop its progression, Rhodes said. Indeed, enlightened social workers interrupted his own progression from victim to perpetrator. But the scale of such intervention, citywide (never mind across the country) is staggering, because it only works one child at a time and must keep each rescued child safe until grown.
In the face of any problem, the cost of action feels real while the price of inaction remains abstract. Where could we possibly find the money and people to bring peace to a generation of children? Perhaps this bloodletting at what was meant to be a moment of joy will reframe the question, and we’ll ask instead: How can we afford not to?
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