As the deadly attack unfolded at Brown University, leaving students hiding under desks and reeling as gunshots rang out, the scene was eerily familiar for at least two students.
Years earlier, Mia Tretta, 21, and Zoe Weissman, 20, had both survived school shootings. “What I’ve been feeling most is just, like, how dare this country allow this to happen to someone like me twice?” Weissman told the New York Times.
Two people were killed and nine others wounded on Saturday after a man dressed in black opened fire during final exams at one of America’s most prestigious colleges. Hundreds of police spent the night scouring the campus and nearby neighbourhoods as the suspect remained at large.
Weissman was in her dorm room at Brown when a friend called to warn her that a shooting was under way. Her initial feelings of panic soon turned to anger, she told NBC. “I’m angry that I thought I’d never have to deal with this again, and here I am eight years later,” Weissman told NBC News.
She was 12 years old when she witnessed a shooting at the high school adjacent to her middle school in Parkland, Florida. The 2018 shooting left 17 people dead.
Tretta was shot in the abdomen in 2019 when a 16-year-old opened fire at Saugus high school, near Los Angeles, killing two people, including her best friend.
“People always think, well, it’ll never be me,” Tretta told the New York Times. “And until I was shot in my school, I also thought the same thing.”
On Saturday, she was in her dormitory, studying. She had initially planned to study in the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building, where the shooting took place, but had changed her mind as she was feeling tired.
Saturday’s attack has again cast a spotlight on longstanding calls for gun control in the US, where gun laws rank among the most permissive in the developed world. So far this year, there have been 389 mass shootings across the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines incidents where four or more victims have been shot. Last year, more than 500 mass shootings were reported.
On Saturday, Tretta and Weissman said they had assumed they would never have to live through another shooting.
“The one thing that gave me comfort was, like, statistically, it’s practically impossible for this to ever happen to me again,” said Weissman. “And clearly, we’re getting to a point where no one can say that any more.”
