For the second straight day, an unidentified man has fired gunshots near the Camp Shelby military post in southern Mississippi, the National Guard said Wednesday.
The latest gunfire happened about 8 a.m. (9 a.m. ET) Wednesday in the same area where gunshots were reported on Tuesday, near a military checkpoint east of the base, Mississippi National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Christian Patterson said.
County authorities and the military are looking for whoever fired the shots, described in both cases as a white male in a red pickup truck, Patterson said.
Information on whether anyone was targeted in either case wasn’t immediately available, though authorities noted that soldiers were at the checkpoint on the county road during Tuesday’s incident.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said Wednesday that all available personnel “will be utilized to locate the suspect” and make an arrest.
“The soldiers at Camp Shelby and across the state can and should take appropriate steps to defend themselves as necessary,” Bryant said. “This is one of the reasons I recently signed an executive order directing certain National Guard personnel to be armed.”
Last month, Bryant issued an executive order allowing the National Guard to arm certain full-time personnel at military facilities. The order was in response to shootings July 16 at two military-related locations in Chattanooga, Tennessee, including at a Navy reserve center where five service members were killed.
Wednesday’s shots were “fired into the air,” Patterson said in a news release.
In the first incident, a man driving a pickup allegedly fired shots around 11:45 a.m. (12:45 p.m. ET) Tuesday near two soldiers who were at the checkpoint, Perry County Sheriff Jimmy Dale Smith said.
Smith said Tuesday evening that it wasn’t clear whether that shooting was intentional or could have been related to hunting.
Smith’s description of the pickup was slightly different than Patterson’s: The sheriff said authorities were looking Tuesday for a maroon pickup with black rims.
Two people investigators questioned Tuesday in connection with another vehicle have been cleared in the case, Smith said.
Active and reserve troops train at the Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, which covers more than 134,000 acres in southern Mississippi about 100 miles from Jackson.
