One person has died and at least 24 others have been injured in a shooting at an auto show in Arkansas, police in the southern US state said on Sunday.
“One person is in custody and the search continues today for others who may have fired into the crowd shortly after 7:00 p.m. yesterday (Saturday),” the Arkansas State Police said in a statement.
The shooting took place in a car fair parking lot in the small town of Dumas, which has some 4,000 inhabitants.
According to the city’s police chief quoted by the local channel KARK, children are among the injured.
The event was intended to “promote non-violence”, one of the organizers, Wallace McGhee, from a youth association, told KARK.
“The priority for all of us has been to get the kids out of reach (of bullets), get people out of reach,” he said, describing the opening moments of the shooting.
“We are devastated and in shock,” also reacted the organizing association, The Hood-Nic Foundation, on its Facebook page.
Shootings are a recurring scourge in the United States where the right to own weapons is guaranteed by the Constitution. Attempts to regulate their sale are often blocked in the US Congress, where the powerful NRA arms lobby wields strong influence.
Since the start of 2022, the Gun Violence Archive site has recorded nearly 9,200 gun deaths in the United States, including suicides. Over the whole of 2021, the number is 45,000 dead, according to the same site.