Two dead, seven hurt in Louisiana cinema shooting

The 58-year-old “lone white male” opened fire about 20 minutes into a screening of the film Train Wreck at the Grand Theatre in Lafayette, before shooting himself dead.

It came just hours after US President Barack Obama said one of his biggest frustrations was the failure to pass “common-sense gun safety laws” in the United States.

Lafayette Police Chief Jim Craft said officers and emergency workers were called to the cinema around 7.30pm.

In total 10 people were shot and eight were taken to hospital, three were crucially injured. Mr Craft said that one person who underwent surgery was “not doing well”.

Eye-witness Tanya Clark told a local television station that she initially thought it was a prank but then saw a woman covered in blood and ran out of the cinema.

Authorities said they know the shooter’s identity and that he had a criminal history, but they are not releasing his name during the early stage of the investigation.

‘Furious and sad’

An area around a car which belonged to the gunman was evacuated after a suspicious item was spotted inside. Around 100 people are thought to have been in and around the cinema at the time of the shooting.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said: “As governor, as a father and as a husband, whenever we hear about these senseless acts of violence it makes us both furious and sad at the same time.”

In an interview hours before the shooting, President Obama said the one area where he has been most frustrated with his presidency is not clamping-down on gun laws.

“The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun safety laws, even in the face of repeated mass killings,” he told the BBC.

The Louisiana shooting comes three years after a gunman opened fire at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, during a screening of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, killing 12 people and wounding 70 others.