A growing number of US residents have experienced more than one massacre.
People pause outside the Brown University Engineering and Physics building, the site of a mass shooting that left at least two people dead and nine others injured the day before, Dec. 14, 2025, in Providence, Rhode Island.
(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
On Saturday, Mia Tretta, a freshman at Brown University, survived her second school shooting. Her first brush with death was close. In 2018, when she was 15, Tretta was shot in the abdomen during the Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, California, that left two students dead and two others wounded. Then, over the weekend, she was one of hundreds of Brown students, faculty and staff who were traumatized by a gunman that left two dead and nine injured.
As Tretta said Spectrum News“No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two.” She added: “I chose Brown, a place that I love, because I felt like it was where I could finally be safe and finally, you know, be normal in this new normal that I'm living in as a school shooting survivor. And it happened again.”
It would be a mistake to simply think of Trett as a particularly unlucky man. In fact, she belongs to a growing community of people in the United States who have survived more than one mass shooting. She's not even the only Brown student in this troubling category.
In 2018, when she was 12 years old, Zoe Weissman was a student at Westglade Middle School, which is adjacent to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The high school shooting left 17 people dead and 18 injured. Another Parkland survivor will be further traumatized by the Florida State University mass shooting.
On X, Weissman published,
When I was 11, I told myself I would never get over a school shooting. When I was 12, I told myself that this would never happen again. Now I've recently turned 20, and I've proven myself wrong once again. First Parkland, now Brown University. My safe haven away from my trauma.
Right-wing media influencer Nick Sortor, who participated in a White House propaganda event about the supposed danger of left-wing extremism, challenged Weissman, asking how she could be in high school at age 12. Sortor did not do the basic research necessary to determine that Weissman High School was affected by the Parkland massacre.
Current number
Sortor is clearly an unscrupulous actor, but he is trying to exploit a broader ignorance of how common mass shootings are and how many times the same people experience multiple riots.
In 2023 CNN reported,
Some Michigan State University students who survived Monday's mass shooting— and their parents — have already gone through similar terrible experiences.
“(Fourteen) months ago, I had to evacuate from Oxford High School when a fifteen-year-old opened fire, killing four of my classmates and wounding seven others. Tonight, I'm sitting under my desk at Michigan State University, texting everyone again, 'I love you,'” Emma Riddle, a freshman studying history at the university, tweeted Monday evening. “When will it end?”
The BBC also reported on other cases where people survived more than one mass shooting. As reported by the BBC notes“For those who witness more than one incident of gun violence in their lifetime, there is an even greater risk of serious mental health problems such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Mass shootings can happen anywhere because horrific anti-Semitic attack at Australia's Bondi Beach, which killed 16 people and injured 42 this weekend. But it is a simple fact that in the United States they occur with particular frequency due to the availability of guns. How American Journal of Public Health documented in 2017, “Mass shootings occur throughout the world but are a particular problem in the United States. Despite containing only 5% of the world's population, approximately 31% of the world's mass shootings occurred in the United States. As of 2015, mass shootings in which four or more people died occurred approximately every 12.5 days.”
The testimony of Mia Tretta and Zoe Weissman helps shed light on just how pervasive and destructive American gun culture is. These are survivors turned activists who used their experiences to advocate for gun control, only to have their fundamental optimism betrayed by a deadlocked political system that refuses to address the issue. With youthful faith in a better world, these students hoped to find refuge at Brown University. Instead, they learned that modern America offers no real respite for traumatized people. The fact that they had to live through the horrors of mass shootings twice while still very young is the harshest condemnation of the status quo imaginable.
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