WASHINGTON: One person was killed and seven were injured in a shooting early Sunday at an outdoor festival in eastern Oklahoma, authorities said.

The shooting — at a Memorial Day festival in Taft, Oklahoma, — alarmed America as it followed a mass shooting in the small Texas town of Uvalde last week.

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) reported that the late Saturday night shooting occurred at an annual event with 1,500 people in attendance. “Witnesses say just after midnight there was an argument and then gunfire erupted,” OSBI said in a tweet. One of the eight injured in the incident died, it added. The injured include several juveniles.

Witnesses said an argument preceded the gunfire. No one had been arrested till Sunday afternoon.

Commenting on the arrest of the man who claimed planning another mass killing, Allie Friesen, the director of the Behavioral Health Clinical Programme, Oklahoma, said: “In this day and age, we have no choice but to take those threats seriously.”

He said that “typically people who participate in acts of violence are really suffering from pretty severe mental health concerns or under the influence of another substance”.

Court documents reveal that Okla­homa City police were called to Oakwood Springs Medical Facility, after Brittan Kirk said he wanted to perform the “large-scale act of violence”. While looking through Kirk’s car, police allegedly found an AR-15 style gun, several hundred rounds of ammunition and a copy of books containing “information and instructions on how to construct homemade explosives”.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2022