A tragically growing number of Americans have lived through more than one mass shooting.

On Saturday, Dec. 13, Mia Tretta, a junior at Brown University, survived her second school shooting. Her first brush with death was a close one. In 2018, when she was 15, Tretta was shot in the abdomen at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, where two students were murdered. Then, in 2025, she was one of hundreds of Brown students, faculty, and staff who were traumatized by a gunman whose spree left two dead and nine injured.

As Tretta told Spectrum News, “No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two… 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 live of a school shooting survivor. And it’s happened again.”

It would be a mistake to simply think of Tretta as unlucky. In fact, she belongs to a growing community of U.S. residents who have survived more than one mass shooting. She’s not even the only Brown student in this disturbing category.

“No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two.”

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 shooting at the high school resulted in 17 dead and 18 injured. Another Parkland survivor would be further traumatized by a mass shooting at Florida State University.

On X, Weissman posted, “When I was 11, I told myself I’d never go through a school shooting. When I was 12, I told myself it would never happen again. Now I’m freshly 20, and I’ve once more been proven wrong. First Parkland, now Brown University. My safe haven away from my trauma.”

Mass shootings can happen anywhere, as the horrific antisemitic attack at Australia’s Bondi Beach that left 16 dead and 42 injured on Dec. 14 shows. But it is a simple fact that they happen with particular frequency in the United States thanks to the ready availability of guns.

As the American Journal of Public Health documented in 2017, “Mass shootings occur worldwide but are a particular problem in the United States. Despite being home to only 5 percent of the world’s population, roughly 31 percent of the world’s mass shootings have occurred in the United States. As of 2015, a mass shooting resulting in the death of four or more people occurred approximately every 12.5 days.”

The testimonies of Mia Tretta and Zoe Weissman help illuminate how pervasive and damaging American gun culture is. They are survivors turned activists who have used their experience to advocate for gun control, but their fundamental optimism has been betrayed by a gridlocked political system that refuses to tackle this problem. They’ve learned that contemporary America provides no real respite for the traumatized. The fact that they’ve had to experience the horrors of mass shootings twice while still very young is a stark condemnation of the status quo.

JEET HEER is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, where this story was originally published.