A gunman who showed up at a showing of the movie Mad Max: Fury Road in a Nashville suburb was shot dead by police on Wednesday, police said.
The gunman was also carrying a hatchet and opened fire at an officer at the Carmike Hickory 8 movie complex in Antioch, a Nashville suburb, and was killed, police spokesman Don Aaron said.
“We believe the imminent threat has been ended,” Aaron told reporters.
He said the gunman had a backpack or some other type of bag on him, and authorities were going though it to make sure that it did not pose a danger.
Nashville television station WSMV quoted witnesses as saying they had seen one person covered with blood.
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 gun violence 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 23 in a movie house during a showing of the comedy film “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 U.S. servicemen in Tennessee and the massacre of nine African Americans at a South Carolina church.
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