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It’s rare for someone to say they’ve experienced a mass shooting, let alone two.
But at just 20 years old, Zoe Weissman now belongs to a club that no one would ever join.
The sophomore says she was in her dorm room on the Brown University campus on Dec. 13 when she received a frantic call from a friend. Weissman says she immediately suspected a shooting had occurred.
“This is something my brain always goes to because of my trauma,” Weissman said How it happens Host: Nil Koksal.
In 2018, Weissman said she was outside the middle school next door when she heard the shots the Valentine’s Day Massacre at Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen people were killed. Weissman was 12 years old at the time.
She says the experience left a lasting mark. She struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and later became involved in gun violence prevention.
“I’m definitely hyper-alert and more aware of my surroundings than my peers, so I think the moment I heard there was an active shooter (at Brown University), I kind of went into survival mode,” Weissman said.
“I just knew pretty well what to do, and I think that’s partly because lockdown drills and school shootings were ingrained in my generation.”
When the alarms came in and it became clear that the shooting was confined to the university’s engineering building, Weissman said she went into fight-or-flight mode and locked and barricaded the door to her dorm.
The lockdown lasted until 6 a.m. She says she spent those agonizing hours keeping up with the news and staying in touch with family members who, in turn, tried to keep her calm.
“They were frustrated too,” Weissman said. “They were frustrated for me; they were frustrated that they had to go through it again too.”
The shooting in Providence, Rhode Island, left two people dead and nine others injured.
The police were needed Five more days to track down the man behind the shooting, suspected of killing a Massachusetts professor before taking his own life.
According to this, there have been at least 394 mass shootings in the United States so far in 2025 Gun Violence Archives.
Weissman says she struggles not only with grief and sadness, but also anger and frustration.
“I think my experience is in some ways an indication that if we allow gun violence to continue in America, this is going to be something that affects everyone personally, and it has already affected so many people personally,” Weissman said.
It turns out Weissman wasn’t the only survivor of gun violence at Brown University last Saturday.
Mia Tretta, 21, was shot in the stomach by a classmate who killed two other people in a mass shooting Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, in 2019. Now a student at Brown University, she was studying in her dorm room when her phone started buzzing with alerts last Saturday.
“No one should ever have to suffer one shooting, let alone two,” Tretta told the Associated Press during a news conference Telephone interview last Sunday. “And as someone who was shot at my high school when I was 15, I never thought I would have to go through something like that again.”
Weissman, now a medical anthropology student, says experiences like these led her to become involved in gun violence prevention in 2019, a process she describes as cathartic and central to her healing. She says she and Tretta have been in touch since the Brown shooting and talked about “things they want to do when they get back on campus.”
“It makes me feel productive, like I’m doing something, especially when your trauma is related to this big, overarching issue that you have completely no control over,” Weissman said.
She says that people who are personally affected by gun violence often first realize that prevention is “worth giving up guns” or putting “restrictions” on guns, but then it’s too late.
Weissman says her message to Americans fighting gun reform is simple.
“The goal is not to take away everyone’s guns,” Weissman said. “The goal is to make sure that people who are willing to commit these crimes don’t have access to guns, and that shouldn’t affect you if you’re a law-abiding citizen who just wants to defend yourself and whatever.”
