Authorities were investigating the incident yesterday evening in the town of Dumas and the “gunfire that swept across a crowd attending a local car show, leaving one person dead, and at least 24 others wounded”, Arkansas state police said in a statement.

A suspect was taken into custody, but police were searching for “others who may have been firing into the crowd of people”, the statement said.

The event’s organisers, the Hood-Nic Foundation, said the group was “heartbroken and in shock” at the tragedy that unfolded at the outdoor event, which a representative of Hood-Nic said was intended to promote non-violence.

“We’re not for violence, we’re against it,” organiser Wallace McGhee told local television station KARK, saying the event had taken place for 16 years without incident and that the group shared condolences with those injured.

“The main issue for all of us was getting kids out of the way, getting people out of the way,” he said.

Police said children were among those injured, a local CBS affiliate reported.

Mass shootings are a relatively common occurrence in the US, where firearms are used in approximately 40,000 deaths a year, including suicides, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.

Lax gun laws and the right to bear arms have repeatedly stymied attempts to clamp down on the number of weapons in circulation, despite greater controls being favoured by the majority of Americans.