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Shooting At Concert In Austria Results In Suicide And Double Murder

By Timothy Raymond
Published on: 00:26 PST, May 23, 2016

Austria seems to have just endured their very first shooting at a concert in a long time early on Sunday morning. According to CNN, after shooting and killing two other men at the concert, the culprit reportedly turned the gun on himself while in his car.

The concert shooting left nearly a dozen civilians injured in a town nearing the Liechtenstein border called Nenzing.

A lover’s spat involving a man in his late-20s and a female attending a motorcycle club concert appears to be the underlying cause for the shooting. After the dispute, the man returned to his car and came back to the concert equipped with a rifle and began shooting into the crowd of people at random.

Authorities reported that among the deceased are two men, 33 and 48 years of age and both from the same region where the concert shooting was committed. Authorities are still investigating if the gunman owned the gun and if it was registered to him or not. No identities have been released of the victims or gunman of the shooting at this time out of respect for the families involved.

Coming from a spokeswoman at the police department, Susanne Dilp, it is noted that the woman allegedly involved in the initial quarrel at the concert parking lot with the gunman suffered no injuries during the shooting.

The mayor of Nenzing communicated, “A stampede broke out.”

During the shooting in a frenzy, the crowd of 150 people dispersed to all parts of adjacent areas, with some ending up in forests, highways, and empty fields. With such relaxed gun laws, Austria rarely sees any gun-related violence. Sport shooting and hunting are popular past times in Austria, allowing individuals from the ages of 18 to possess different types of rifles and shotguns. The only stipulation is a law that requires the firearm to be registered within six weeks of purchasing it.

Hosted by a motorcycle club known as the Lords, the event has been held annually for nearly a decade without any prior records of being the host to a mass shooting. Locals would describe the outing similarly as to how we see music festivals in North America: “a great barbeque with music.” A diverse crowd of people would get together and enjoy the good music, eat, and make new friends.

Attendants of the event describe it as “the biggest biker event in Vorarlberg with 48 hours of non-stop parties and live music.”

The reckoning of this type of shooting is larger on an emotional level for the Austrian people than the way North Americans view it simply because they have grown accustomed and possibly desensitized to similar shooting-based attacks of this nature. Whether we go to a concert, a club, or even a movie theater, you can hear people joking in line about a shooter possibly waiting in line to the concert or event and not even knowing it. Just last year, the Inquisitr reported about Chris Brown getting blacklisted from a club because of a shooting at a concert.

Last August, according to USA Today, authorities even arrested a man for a shooting outside of a Big Sean and J-Cole concert. There are more similar-styled shootings just like these in North America that happen three or four times a year.

With any tragedy such as this, we wish to offer our condolences to the families involved as well as the other individuals in attendance at this event. It is reported that the police responded in a professional and swift manner, so we applaud the police force for doing their job, serving its community in their time of need.

We will be updating this as we learn more about the shooting and details of the victims and gunman related to this concert shooting.

[Photo by Jan Hetfleisch/Getty Images]

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