A gunman – who was also wielding an axe – opened fire at a Nashville-area theater showing of the movie “Mad Max: Fury Road” on Wednesday and was shot dead by police after injuring at least one person.
More than a dozen emergency vehicles were on the scene at the Carmike Hickory 8 movie complex in Antioch, where one man suffered minor injuries from the axe, and that man and two women were treated for exposure to pepper spray, possibly from the gunman, officials said.
“We believe the imminent threat has been ended,” police spokesman Don Aaron said. He said the gunman, a 51-year-old man, had a bag with him, and authorities were going through it to make sure that it did not pose a danger.
Brian Haas of the Nashville Fire Department said none of the injuries, including the axe wound, appeared to be serious and none of the victims were transported to area hospitals. “It appeared to be nothing but a bad bruise,” he told reporters referring to the person struck by the axe.
Two employees of a nearby Starbucks restaurant said they heard three or four gunshots and saw several police, fire trucks and ambulance vehicles responding.
The shooting comes less than two weeks after three people were killed and nine were wounded when a gunman opened fire in a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. The gunman was among the dead.
In the Lafayette incident, the 59-year-old gunman opened fire on July 23rd in a movie house during a showing of the comedy “Trainwreck.” Two theatergoers were killed before he took his own life as police closed in.
That shooting came almost three years to the day after 12 people were slain and dozens wounded by a gunman at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, during a midnight screening of the Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises.”
The Nashville shooting follows the fatal shooting of five US servicemen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the massacre of nine African Americans at a South Carolina church.