The Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade turned into an atrocity. Don’t think it couldn’t happen here.

Charles Ramsey had his television tuned to the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade Wednesday afternoon, watching the event with a cop’s eye, with an understanding of how quickly calm can turn to chaos and then into horror. One dead, 22 wounded, the peace and joy of a community’s celebration of a sports championship pierced by the crack of gunfire and the sight of blood — it was the kind of atrocity that kept Ramsey up at night for eight years here, when he was as good a police commissioner as Philadelphia ever had. It was the kind of atrocity that, even while he was preparing for the half-million people who flooded the streets for the Phillies’ World Series parade in 2008, he knew he’d be fortunate to stop.

“It didn’t happen with the Phillies, thank God, but that doesn’t mean that we did something that would have prevented it,” Ramsey said in a phone interview Thursday. “It could have happened if somebody was of the mind to do something like that.”

Anybody can come to a parade. That was the reality that Ramsey had to deal with in 2008, and he started confronting it weeks before Brad Lidge struck out Eric Hinske for the final out of Game 5. Crowd control was the primary concern — along the mile or two of the parade route, near the stage, do what has to be done so that the event can come off. Line the streets with bike racks. Target the spots and corners where things might get out of hand. “Frankford and Cottman is a good example,” he said. Staff up. Cancel days off. Bring in outside assistance from the state police if necessary. Deploy horse patrols. Make your presence obvious.

Do all that, and everyone probably will be OK. Even then, it was just probably.

“If the Phillies had won or the Eagles had won last year, it would be a different way of planning,” Ramsey said. “You’d have to plan not only crowd control, but you’d have to have serious concerns about somebody introducing a gun. It’s a damn shame, but it’s the climate we’re in.

“At certain events, you’d think it was unlikely that you’re going to have something like that occur. But at this point, where we are as a country, that’s less and less likely that you can make that assumption. You have to assume and take into account the possibility. But the reality is, and they had like 800 police officers in Kansas City and a million people. You do the math on that — I mean, come on. You can’t be everywhere.”

So much has changed in the 16 years since. For the worse.

“The biggest difference,” Ramsey said, “is the amount of guns.”

Yes, but it’s not the only difference. The two suspects who have been charged in the Kansas City shooting are juveniles. This means they were already breaking the law by carrying guns, and they broke the law by firing those guns. They apparently were involved in a dispute that led to the shooting. Which means they didn’t show up at the parade intending to kill any of the attendees. They just didn’t give a damn if they happened to. There’s no legislation that will cure that deadly indifference to human life, that depravity, and the ease with which it spreads now.

“I know people say, ‘You can’t arrest your way out of this,’ ” Ramsey said. “Let me tell you something: Locking some of these guys up is part of the solution. I’m all for alternatives to incarceration, but I’m telling you: Some of these guys need to be [obscenity] locked up. You’ve got to send a message.”

It’s as good a potential solution as any. The terrifying part of this sort of violence, the sort we seem to experience or read about so often anymore, is not necessarily even the volume of it. It’s the nature and locations of it. At school. At church. At bars and nightclubs. At a giant public party for a Super Bowl victory. At places where people aren’t supposed to worry when they’re around each other, even when they’re around strangers. In this fragmented, fractured society, there are only so many aspects of the culture that are widely shared, that break down those walls of defensiveness, that bring strangers together. Sports, at its best, is one. But those places don’t feel safe anymore, either.

“I would hate to see the day,” Ramsey said, “when cities are afraid to have a celebratory parade for a sports team — or people are afraid that they can’t bring a kid to it — simply because of fear that some [jerk] is going to bring a gun and cause a problem.”

That day is coming unless something changes. Something in our hearts. Something in our laws. Eleven children were hospitalized Wednesday. Nine of them had been shot. Lisa Lopez-Galvan, who died, was a mother of two. Of course it could happen here. Of course it could. We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t.