Touchdown.

Chiefs are Super Bowl champions.

A week of joyous celebration ends in tragedy.

Gunfire screams as a horrifying reality set.

Fans, including families running for their lives.

I'm absolutely terrified right now and honestly, I don't think I could handle going back to another parade for parades, rallies, schools, movies.

It seems like almost nothing is safe.

So what now?

And with the world watching, will it reshape how we do things in Kansas City?

From the fast approaching World Cup to the Royals plans to build a new ballpark just blocks away.

A week in review is made possible through the generous support of AARP, Kansas City RSM Dave and Jamie Cummings, Bob and Marlese Gourley the Courtney S Turner Charitable Trust, John H Mize and Bank of America NA co trustees.

The restaurant at 1900.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Nick Haynes.

What just happened?

Pretty much the entire agenda for this week's show can be simply ripped up as we came to grips with a tragedy that's shaken many Kansas citizens and projects an ugly image of our town just as we are trying to impress the world.

I don't know how the show will unfold, but glad to have the experience of long time newsman Dave Helling with us.

Mary Sanchez was at the parade to report for our own newsroom.

Brian Ellison tracks the region's top political issues for Casey.

While news and Pete Mundo, who's been trying to make sense of what seems to be so senseless to his listeners at Kansas City talk radio station, 95.7 FM, KCMO.

This should have been, of course, the most joyous week in Kansas City history.

It certainly started that way.

Geez, Kate, no evil Baker, but a storybook week is quickly turned upside down and its final chapter ends in horror.

Gunfire screams as a horrifying reality set.

Fans, including families running for their lives.

I'm absolutely terrified right now, and honestly, I don't think I can handle going back to another parade for this.

It's not worth my daughter's life.

Parades, rallies, schools, movies.

It seems like almost nothing is safe.

Some of the scenes this week playing out just a few blocks from the studio we're sitting in.

Mary Sanchez, I asked you Wednesday morning to go to the parade and report back to us what you found.

This was certainly not what you were expecting to experience when you went there.

No, I was not expecting it.

Although, you know, as any reporter, most people you do think about, okay, what if, you know, I was speaking with the BBC earlier this morning to be interviewed from London about a tragedy here and have them carry Stacy Graves live as she's giving the update that tells you what type of focus this brings.

And yeah, I agree with everyone else.

We're better than this, but we are also this.

We do have high levels.

See that going all the time.

This is not our Kansas City, but this is Kansas City, isn't it, Brian?

Well, it is.

It is every city, Nick.

It is every city in the United States, at least.

And this has continued to unfold.

It is also Kansas City in the sense that we have an incredibly high homicide rate.

And one of the realities of this event is that this one death is tragic, But we have had one death every couple of days for the last several years, just perhaps not as prominently visible in the city as in front of Union Station with thousands of people.

Now, all of this, of course, is happening when Kansas City leaders are trying to project a vibrant image of this community to the world.

Are these the pictures we wanted to see played out on every primetime network news show in the country?

Chaos erupted as shots rang out at the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Super Bowl victory parade today.

And this is how international viewers were seeing the tragedy unfold.

This report from the BBC in London, they came to welcome their victors after a win in America's biggest sporting event.

The celebration turns to chaos in the streets of Kansas City.

Police tonight say two armed people have been taken into custody as America's gun problem now haunts another mass event.

How are people?

These are the same people we are expecting to come to our World Cup here in 2026.

Soccer fans from England, France, Australia, Japan, all watching these scenes.

You know, time heals a lot of wounds.

I don't think it'll necessarily have any impact on the World Cup.

But I think, you know, you look at this and the last half decade, the Chiefs have been the crown jewel of this town.

The underbelly has been the violent crime that still has not gotten under control.

And in many ways, those two things clashed on Wednesday.

And we saw the best of Kansas City meet the worst of Kansas City.

And the national story now is something that we've talked about in this show, on my show at this desk for years.

And now the world is seeing what Kansas City has dealt with now for far too long.

If the world has forever, that's one thing that it's really hard for.

And I understand why for Americans, North Americans, to understand how the world views us, the rest of the world doesn't have gun laws like we have.

They don't have gun access and frankly, they don't have the Western kind of romance history with it.

They have hunting, but not in the same way.

It's just their perception of the U.S.

They're always hyper focused on our gun violence because it doesn't happen elsewhere.

Brian, the governor of Missouri was right there on the stage when the Union Station by a security staff right after that shooting was taking place.

Many Missouri lawmakers, they had the day off.

They canceled all sessions in the Missouri legislature in that Jefferson city for this event.

They were there with their families.

Will this change in any way, gun policy or any other laws in the state of Missouri?

Well, it doesn't seem like to at least likely to hear from at least the initial response.

Representative Ashley only spoke on KCR on Thursday morning, talked about huddling in fear in a restroom inside Union Station.

She came out calling for revisiting the the lax gun laws, some of the most lenient in the nation that Missouri has.

House Speaker Dean Parker was asked about it in a press conference Thursday morning.

He actually abruptly ended the press conference after he was asked about it a couple of times and said he didn't he wasn't going to talk about that.

And Ashley only took to Twitter just after that to call him an expletive coward.

That's the tone that gun gun discussion has had in the Missouri legislature for many years.

It doesn't seem likely to change even with this incident.

Do you see any change in gun laws in the state of Missouri as a result of this incident, Pete?

And if not, what other solutions do you see happening as a result of this?

I do not.

First off, you know, as we sit here with this conversation right now, we don't even have the information to discuss what gun law changes what took place on Wednesday.

People have jumped on that.

I understand everything gets political far too quickly.

But we don't have the facts to discuss what gun laws should be on the table.

It is ludicrous to go there as of this conversation right now.

What will happen?

What could happen?

I mean, I think you're going to see a hotly contested prosecutor's race this year in Jackson County that a lot of people are pointing to as a potential thing that might at least help this on some level.

One of the things about this Pete mentioned that may not have implications for the World Cup.

What about events coming up?

We have a St Patrick's Day parade coming up.

And I have to say here at our own station, we do all celebrate Asian at the station event on Memorial Day weekend, right at that very spot with the Kansas City Symphony at Union Station.

We have some crew members now saying they feel too traumatized to take part in that event now.

Right.

On Thursday, Mayor Quinton Lucas said he did not expect that this event would change Kansas City's willingness to engage in mass gatherings like this.

Nick, I think he's wrong.

I think today there are conversations all over the city about what do we do now when you have 600 police officers, which is half of the force on the ground at Union Station, plus another 250, 300 other law enforcement agencies, personnel in the area.

And you still have this kind of incident.

It's hard to see how you can have an event like the St Patrick's Day parade or for that matter, the World Cup.

If there's any mass gathering there, how you can have that and still expect people to show up.

I think the people at the World Cup are looking and going, now what do we do?

Do we alter our approach again to mass gatherings or mass celebrations?

We'll see.

I will say one other thing.

I don't think that this will change a thing about Missouri's guns law or gun laws, because after almost two dozen kids were slaughtered in Connecticut, nothing was done.

And in fact, gun laws were loosened in this state and in parts of this country.

If that massacre doesn't change the approach of people to the ubiquitousness of weaponry in our country, nothing will.

Nothing is going to.

That was an interesting thought piece in the Kansas City Star, your former newspaper this week about different gun laws.

But it talked about another gun law in Connecticut, which has one of the strictest gun laws in the country, New Haven, Connecticut, sort of double digit increase in homicides last year, spiking by almost 65%.

Don't those who believe in gun rights point to those statistics that show even when there are loose gun, strict gun laws, you can still see that violent crime increase substantially.

The case I've made for years, Nick, is just because laws fail sometimes doesn't mean they're not important.

We don't abandon DUI laws because some people still get drunk and drive.

We try to tweak them to make them more effective and that would be the case in a normal world.

But guns are not normal.

Look, two of the suspects in this case are juveniles.

How kids get a hold of that stuff is a scandal and a shame on our country.

And there is no willingness, in my view, politically to actually address it.

Do we also I want to know literally the full story.

Who were these young people?

How did they get the gun?

Where was it originally purchased?

How many hands did it go through?

And we can do that.

We have that type of technology to figure all of that out.

And that's where you start to see some of the solutions.

It's massive, the impact.

And we do need to grasp this moment and not just say that it's just another shooting.

Oh, it's so bad that it happened.

You know, we had in 2019, the first Friday shooting, a Johnson young Johnson County woman was killed.

The first Friday's been very popular, hugely crowded events.

Similar issue.

There was a random gun incident.

She was just part of a bystander.

What really changed as a result of that?

Well, nothing changed legislatively.

You had city leaders calling for changes.

You had some mostly Democrats in the Missouri legislature calling for changes.

But those don't go anywhere.

What I what I think is true and where I agree with Pete is that we don't know exactly what what particular policy changes would have made a difference in this particular incident.

I think the real question, Nick, might be even bigger than what particular policy changes.

It has to do with the American culture around guns.

It has to do with the sheer quantity of guns that we feel are necessary to keep around.

It has to do with with people's hearts and whether they they are willing to put the lives of people ahead of their need to have these weapons.

And I think that is something that goes even beyond the policy conversation.

This event didn't happen.

This event didn't happen at the NFL draft.

That was an enclosed area.

You had to go to an app.

A lot of people criticized that at the time, though, Pete, that you had to go through that and local businesses didn't get the amount of money they wanted because they had to go to a pool vendors in the enclosed gated site.

But is that what it requires now for all these big public events that you're going to have to go through a fenced area with your cell phone so we can identify you before you can go in?

I think we might very well see more of that in not just Kansas City, but in American public life in general.

Look at what's happened over the last generation airports, schools.

I mean, we know that that is par for the course.

Now.

But I think we're all having this conversation, looking at this and talking about, yes, we have to minors who apparently possess these firearms, which already when you look at state law and city ordinances, they can't have.

So I bring it back to if we're going to go into the policy route, there's a broader picture federally to have.

But if we're going to have the nuanced policy about Missouri, what are we adding?

What are we adding in the wake of what just happened that we hope could prevent it from happening again?

And it's too early to really tell.

It's not about avoiding the conversation.

It's just if we're going to have that, then let's have it in a meaningful, substantial way.

And no one here can do that right now.

No one wants a meaningful conversation about guns We've been going through.

I've been a reporter for 45 years, and this has been an issue since John F Kennedy was shot with a rifle in 1963.

And no one wants to really look at why there are 400 million weapons in this country.

A lot of people agree with Pete that there's no law that would stop this, as if laws stop anything from happening.

Of course, sometimes laws are broken, laws maybe have broken in this situation.

The question is, why are we awash in dangerous weapons available easily to children and then wonder why were they fired off at a rally for the local football team?

It's almost inevitable.

And no one no one in this country, Nick, in my experience, has really stopped to confront that issue and to try and prevent tragedies like this from happening.

Let's look at Kansas City.

There's a crime problem in Kansas City, a violent crime problem.

The problem in Kansas City is really in the Jackson County, part of Kansas City.

It is not a Clay County.

It is not in the county.

We have a shooting at Crown Center a month ago.

Can anyone at this table name anyone who is charged in a shooting around innocent bystanders in Crown Center?

I don't actually.

Event very recently has been where there was a dinner conversation and most of the people at that conversation were from Kansas City, had never even heard that there was a Crown Center shooting.

There you go.

I mean, you have people right now who are shooting guns at Crown Center and no one has been charged a month after the fact.

Let's look at the other implications of this, because we're also in this very same week this is happening the the royals who are announcing they're building a downtown ball park within blocks of this happening.

If you're saying that you have such a crime issue in a very certain specific area of the city, what does that do, if anything, to the conversation about a downtown ballpark park and people's appetites to go downtown, Brian?

Well, I'm not.

I think it's very difficult to identify one of the locations in Jackson County over others as being more prone to gun violence.

I mean, I think there's there's lots of implications there.

I do think, though, it affects very much the conversation about the sales tax vote in April and how the royals and the Chiefs are going to be able to sort of capitalize on the Chiefs success and enthusiasm for sports across this region when the the nation, the region's enthusiasm had was so severely dampened and appropriately so by what happened yesterday.

Does it hurt the tax election?

Well, I think it has a major impact, in part because of what Brian is suggesting, which really sort of, you know, this event, this tragedy sucked some of the air out of the campaign using footage of the parade to sell the tax is going to be probably said that they were going to be using all of the gas.

And how does Patrick Mahomes cut a commercial now supporting the tax after the event at Union Station?

I think it has a major impact.

It will cause people to rethink the idea of a downtown stadium as opposed to Truman, which is basically isolated and arguably safer.

Although let's be clear, there has been gunfire at Royals Stadium, Kauffman Stadium in the past.

No places immune.

We jumped ahead that when we think about this downtown ball park, because this the tragedy of this parade dominated the news cycle, eclipsing what was going to be the biggest announcement of the week.

Finally, the chiefs, the royals, rather, putting us out of our misery.

They have picked their site.

Where do they plan to build?

Immediately south of T-Mobile Center on a stretch of land that includes the former Kansas City stars, Old Glass Press Pavilion building.

And we're happy and excited to build that new home without costing taxpayers a penny more.

In fact, the proposal voters will consider on April 2nd will be the exact same tax, but a much better deal.

Now, this site had been rumored for weeks.

Mary, I know we've heard from Dave Helling here talking about the challenges of this site, but what would be the biggest advantage of this location versus the others they picked?

It depends on your perspective, but I think to power in like.

CORNISH It's it does not create a competing entertainment district further to the east.

It just helps them expand on everything that's already occurring there.

It's also going to be right next to that South Loop project, which is basically the highway lead that they'll place there and make it into an urban park.

So you'll be able to basically cross from that stadium right to T-Mobile Center and the Power and Light District and also just two blocks from the streetcar line, which makes it a lot more integrated into the city's transportation options.

Of course, there are some downsides.

Just quickly now, the cover over I 670 is not the one that's been discussed today.

That one goes farther to the west next to the Loews Hotel.

This cover would be a new proposal that would need to be funded somewhere.

And the royals were utterly unclear on who's going to pay for that if the news comes.

Contrary to what Dave Helling said, though, Pete, you said this week because Patrick Mahomes said he on Twitter, boy, I'm excited about this.

I can't wait.

A sort of endorsement from him for this.

And you said that was a slam dunk that this would now pass.

Well, that was you know, that was a tragedy.

I mean, this is now I still think the money in this town is going to be behind this.

We know that the unions, they're going to run advertising around it.

And it's a tax extension of course, not an increase that will appeal to some people.

But I think to the point of some of the colleagues here, there are some very good points being made about.

First off, people in Easton Jack, saying, hey, I like Kauffman Stadium.

You also have people maybe in the urban core saying, I like the East Village better.

And now you have the crossroads, folks.

Some of them are not happy about potentially losing their coffee shops, their breweries and eminent domain taking place, or at least sales between building owners and the royals.

So in a weird way, you could potentially have progressive leaning folks downtown coming together with conservative leaning folks in the eastern part of the county to stop this thing.

I'm not saying it's likely, but it's possible.

Yeah, I think the most the most vehement opposition in the the few days since this announcement was made has come from the crossroads, from business owners, many of whom don't own the buildings that would be sold to the royals who who object to this and don't know what their future might hold.

I think the case that the royals have to make to overcome that opposition or to to win those folks over if that's possible is to say that they're tending to the needs of those businesses to attend to what the positive impact on the community and the environment that has been created in Crossroads, which has seen itself as an arts district, not perhaps as a sports or entertainment district.

And how how that will integrate and how those businesses might be taken care of.

I don't know if that can happen.

I don't know if the Royals intend to make that case, but I think that's the difference between the opposition we're seeing now and actual success for this project.

There are two little factoids that I thought was interesting from the press conference this week.

First of all, was that the royals, this new stadium would be 34,000 seats.

I was told, you know, this is going be a lot smaller.

This is only going to be about 4000 seats smaller than the current stadium.

So not a huge change there.

And this line, the royals would buy the property and give it to Jackson County, which would then own the stadium.

What do we think about that, Dave?

A couple of things.

First, the Royals contribution to this project will include the purchase of those properties.

They'll add up the value and say, Hey, we put X amount into it.

One of the things I talk about this week is if the Royals, if the stadium is to be owned by Jackson County, why do the Royals get to pick the builder, an architect?

It should be the people of Jackson County who are building this stadium with their own tax dollars.

That isn't clear and the royals contribution isn't clear and the state's contribution isn't clear.

Just one quick point.

I think if this is to pass, the Chiefs need to become much more actively involved in the campaign.

We've got about six and a half weeks to go.

They need to be front and center and that's why the event at Union Station has an impact, because it makes it harder for the chiefs to step forward now and say, hey, forget all that that happened at the parade.

Let's talk about what we want to do at the sports complex.

That's a tough, tough pivot.

Now, many people are asking what happens if the tax fails?

We now have an answer.

Independents now making a bid for the team.

I believe people in eastern Jackson County would rather watch baseball and independents than rather watch the royals in Nashville.

That's independents, man Rory Roland, who is promising a sight on our next to independence Center Mall, which is currently on the market.

Is there any evidence, Pete, they would entertain a move to independence?

I know my backyard might be a good spot to you know, it's probably not big enough, but, you know, I, I mean, you know, it takes months to get these you know, they got to do soil studies, They got to have architecture work done.

There's just no way to start from scratch unless maybe it fails.

They got to readdress it, go back next year and try to get on the ballot again, because they're not going to do it in August or November during a presidential year.

But I don't see any way so you're not seeing the Independence Mall site potentially for a new Rose Bowl Park if this vote fails in April.

It's it's never it's okay to be fashionably late.

It's never good to be that late to the party.

Okay.

We had a lot of things on our agenda this week which we simply couldn't get to as the events so certainly changed during the course of the week.

But when you put a program like this together every week, of course you can't get to all of those stories grabbing the headlines.

What was the big local story we missed in a local story making international news?

A Kansas City mother is charged with killing her one month old baby after placing the infant in a heated up.

And she told police she mistook the oven for the child's crib.

Fresh from this week's big stadium announcement, the royals are now in surprise Arizona for the start of spring training.

In statehouse news, Missouri lawmakers tried to block Kansas City's new income discrimination law.

Kris Kobach is back in the news this week.

The Kansas attorney general wants to follow Alabama's lead to begin hydrogen gas executions in the Sunflower State.

Kansas has not executed a single inmate since the death penalty was reinstated in 1994.

We know school superintendents have a short lifespan, but this week, Shawnee Mission picks its third school leader in three years.

Remember the outrage over that stolen Jackie Robinson statue in Kansas?

An arrest has been made, but according to Wichita police, it wasn't a hate crime after all.

They say it was a financial crime.

The police chief says the man now charged with the crime was trying to make money off of the scrap metal.

He's Travis, Kelsey's next stop.

Hollywood.

The chief star gets his first executive producer credit for a new movie starring Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman.

Okay.

Some of the stories happening this week that we simply didn't get to.

But did you pick one of those stories, Brian, or something completely different?

I did pick something different.

The Missouri legislature did move forward.

The Senate moved forward in considering the proposals to reform the initiative petition process.

It was filibustered by Democrats.

And then the recess, because of the Chiefs parade, put it off for the rest of the week.

But rest assured, it will be back.

Even after all the conflict and hubbub of Republicans fighting with one another in the Missouri Senate.

This proposal is going to move forward, and it's a proposal that would profoundly change the way democracy and citizen initiatives play out in the state of Missouri.

I did see one story, one line I thought was interested in this, He said.

In the Missouri Senate, not one bill had passed in the six weeks the session has been on.

Was that a typo, Brian?

That is not a typo.

There has been a significant conflict in the Missouri Senate, but but the logjam may break when they come back.

Mary.

You know it.

It will.

Full circle back a little bit to where we started, but I would like to give a shout out to all the heroes that stepped forward yesterday.

I mean, I'm hearing these stories of incredible adults, comforting children that happened everywhere across Kansas City yesterday.

And of course, it was private citizens who wrestled the alleged suspects to the ground in this case to date.

On a lighter note, it seems as if the parade came across the new Buck O'Neil Bridge.

They all gathered at the old downtown airport and came up that bridge.

And on Thursday, the first part of the old Buck O'Neil Bridge was exploded and brought into the river.

For those of us of a certain age to see that the triple humped bridge come down was quite a sign.

Pete ended on, I guess, the ultimate lighter note, given the stories this weekend.

Travis, Kelsey, I've seen a lot of bad late night drunk karaoke, but gosh, that friends in low places that he delivered to the crowd on Wednesday was the worst rendition of any song I've heard 30.

And the word around here will be, yes, What?

Oh, I love.

If he goes Hollywood, I would suggest he'd leave himself out of any singing lines.

And sadly, of course, all of that footage, all of those joyous moments, the things that people remember was suddenly just vanished because of everything that happened later.

And that's very, very unfortunate, which is why we didn't see all of those glorious scenes on this program this weekend that we will say a week has been reviewed courtesy of Marie Sanchez from the Kansas City PBS NEWSROOM, Flat land and 6 to 10 weekdays on 95.7 FM KCMO Pete Mundo from Casey Wian.

He was Brian Elison and former star newsman Dave Helling.

And I'm McCain's from all of us here at Kansas City, PBS.

Be well, keep calm and carry on.