The FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce has been called in to help investigate a deadly mass shooting in downtown Austin, Texas, on Sunday morning in which a gunman opened fire in front of a bar popular with university students, killing two people and injuring 14 others before being fatally shot by police.
The city’s police chief described the violence as a “tragic, tragic incident”, with the first calls about it being made to emergency services from Buford’s bar in West Sixth Street at 1.59am. Police responded within 57 seconds, according to officials.
When officers arrived at the bar, they were immediately confronted by a male gunman pointing a weapon at them, Austin police chief Lisa Davis said in an early morning press conference. They returned fire and killed the suspect.
By then, two bar customers had been killed. Fourteen more people were shot with injuries that required hospital treatment, three of whom were described to be in critical condition.
Videos taken inside the bar and posted on social media showed several people lying on the floor being treated by paramedics. One woman who was administering CPR to an individual lying on their back can be heard in the video shouting: “Please help me – I need help!”
The Austin American-Statesman reported that the gunman had used a pistol and an assault-rifle in the shooting, citing law enforcement. The identity of the man and his motives remain unknown, along with the names of his slain victims.
Austin is the state capital of Texas with just over 1 million people. Its mayor, Kirk Watson, told reporters that he was thankful for the swift response of public safety officers.
The death toll could have risen substantially higher were it not for the arrival of police officers at the scene within under a minute.
“They saved lives. The speed with which they provided help and aid to people made a difference,” Watson said.
The emergency medical services chief of Austin, Robert Luckritz, said that police officers and paramedics were routinely embedded in the city’s downtown entertainment district at the weekend, which meant they were able to respond within seconds.
Eyewitnesses and bystanders spoke of the horrifying nature of the attack. “I heard screaming and yelling and crying,” Jeremiah Carbajal, a concierge at a nearby residential building, told the Austin American-Statesman.
A former manager at Buford’s, Scott Yancy, hugged one of the employees at the bar and burst into tears. He expressed gratitude that all the staff had survived.
“I’m so glad everyone is OK,” he said.
While local police investigators and FBI agents begin the painstaking work of piecing together the shooter’s actions and motivations, attention is already falling on Texas’s lax gun laws. Everytown, the advocacy group working to end gun violence, ranks Texas 32 out of 50 states for its weak systems of firearms control.
The group points out that five of the worst mass shootings in the past decade have taken place in Texas, and it accuses state lawmakers who assemble in Austin of continuing to “sit on their hands and refuse to enact foundational gun safety laws”.
Among its weak laws is an ordinance that allows anyone to carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit.
The Gun Violence Archive which curates one of the most authoritative databases of US gun violence, has recorded 56 mass shootings in the country so far this year as of early Sunday. The site defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more victims are shot or killed, not including the attacker.
US House member Greg Casar, a Democrat who represents parts of Austin, called for action on the scourge of guns in the country. “We must end America’s gun violence epidemic,” he said on X. “Americans should be able to have fun at a bar without it turning into an unspeakable nightmare like this one.”
Austin was not the only US city to be touched by gun violence in the early hours of Sunday. At least nine people were injured in a shooting in Cincinnati that took place at about 1am at a music venue, Riverfront Live.
All the victims in that case were taken to nearby hospitals with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. There was no immediate information about a suspect in that shooting.
