In America, Mass Shooting Survivors Can Never Know Peace
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December 15, 2025
A growing number of U.S. residents have experienced more than one massacre.
People take a break outside the Brown University Engineering and Physics Building, 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, Brown University student Mia Tretta survived her second school shooting. His first contact with death was close. In 2018, when she was 15, Tretta was shot in the abdomen during a shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, that left two students dead and murdered and injured two others. Then, over the weekend, she was among hundreds of Brown students, faculty and staff who were traumatized by a gunman whose spree left two dead and nine injured.
Like 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 it felt like somewhere I could finally be safe and finally, you know, be normal in this new normal that I’m experiencing as a school shooting survivor. And it happened again.
It would be a mistake to simply view Tretta as particularly unlucky. In fact, she belongs to a growing community of American residents who have survived more than one mass shooting. She’s not even the only brown student in this disturbing category.
In 2018, when she was 12 years old, Zoe Weissman was a student at Westglade Middle School, adjacent to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. A high school shooting left 17 dead and 18 injured. Another Parkland survivor is reportedly even more traumatized by a mass shooting at Florida State University.
On X, Weissman posted:
When I was 11, I told myself I would never experience a school shooting. When I was 12, I told myself it wouldn’t happen again. Now I’m just 20 years old and I’ve been wrong again. First Parkland, now Brown University. My refuge from my trauma.
Right-wing media influencer Nick Sortor, who participated in a White House propaganda event about the alleged dangers of left-wing extremism, challenged Weissman by asking how she could have been in high school at 12 years old. Sortor did not do the basic research necessary to discover that Weissman’s middle school was affected by the Parkland massacre.
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Sortor is obviously a bad faith actor, but he’s trying to exploit a broader ignorance about the ubiquity of mass shootings and how often the same people survive multiple sprees.
In 2023, CNN reported:
Some Michigan State University students who survived Monday’s shooting — along with their parents — had already endured a similar, horrific experience.
“Fourteen months ago, I had to evacuate Oxford High School when a fifteen-year-old opened fire and killed four of my classmates and injured seven others. Tonight, I’m sitting under my desk at the University of Michigan, once again sending everyone an ‘I love you’ message,” Emma Riddle, a freshman history major at the university, tweeted Monday night. “When is this going to end?”
The BBC has also reported other cases of people surviving more than one mass shooting. As the BBC notes, “for those who have witnessed more than one instance of gun violence in their lifetime, the risk of serious mental health problems like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder is even greater.” »
Mass shootings can happen anywhere, as demonstrated by the horrific anti-Semitic attack on Bondi Beach in Australia, which left 16 people dead and 42 injured over the weekend. But it is a simple fact that these phenomena occur particularly frequently in the United States thanks to the availability of firearms. Like the American Journal of Public Health documented in 2017, “mass shootings occur worldwide but are a particular problem in the United States. Although the country is home to only 5% of the world’s population, approximately 31% of the world’s mass shootings took place in the United States. In 2015, a mass shooting resulting in the deaths of four or more people occurred approximately every 12.5 days.”
The testimonies of Mia Tretta and Zoe Weissman help shed light on how pervasive and damaging America’s gun culture is. They are survivors-turned-activists who used their experience to advocate for gun control, but their fundamental optimism has been betrayed by a deadlocked political system that refuses to tackle the issue. With their youthful faith in a better world, these students hoped to find refuge at Brown University. What they learned is that contemporary America offers no real respite for the traumatized. The fact that they had to experience the horrors of mass shootings twice while still very young is as harsh an indictment of the status quo as one can make.
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