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It’s rare for anyone to claim to have experienced just one mass shooting, let alone two.
But at just 20 years old, Zoe Weissman now belongs to a club no one would ever choose to join.
The sophomore says she was in her room on the Brown University campus on Dec. 13 when she received a frantic phone call from a friend. Weissman says she immediately suspected there had been a shooting.
“It’s something my brain always turns to because of my trauma,” Weissman said. As it happens host, Nil Koksal.
In 2018, Weissman says she was outside the nearby middle school when she heard gunshots from 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 activism around gun violence prevention.
“I’m definitely more hyper-vigilant, more aware of my surroundings than my peers, and so I think the second I heard there was an active shooter [at Brown University]I kind of went into…survival mode,” Weissman said.
“I knew exactly what to do, and I think part of that is because my generation grew up with lockdown drills and school shootings ingrained in us.”
As alerts began to pour in and it became clear the shooting was confined to the university’s engineering building, Weissman says she went into fight-or-flight mode, locking and barricading the door to her dorm room.
The confinement lasted until 6 a.m. the next day. She says she spent those agonizing hours watching the news for updates and staying in touch with family members, who tried to keep her calm – once again.
“They were frustrated, too,” Weissman said. “They were frustrated for me; they were frustrated that they had to go through that again too.”
The shooting in Providence, Rhode Island, left two people dead and nine others injured.
It took the police five more days to find man suspected of shooting, suspected of killing Massachusetts professor before committing suicide.
So far in 2025, there have been at least 394 mass shootings in the United States, according to the Gun violence archives.
Weissman says she struggles not only with grief and sadness, but also anger and frustration.
“I think my experience is kind of indicative of the fact that if we allow gun violence to continue like this in America, it’s going to impact everyone personally, and it’s already impacted 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 abdomen by a classmate who killed two others in a mass shooting in Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, in 2019. Now a student at Brown, she was studying in her dorm when her phone started ringing with emergency alerts last Saturday.
“No one should ever have to endure just one shooting, let alone two,” Tretta told The Associated Press at a news conference. telephone interview last Sunday. “And as someone who was shot at my high school when I was 15, I never thought it was something I would have to go through again.”
Weissman, now a medical anthropology student, says experiences like these are part of what led her to get involved in gun violence prevention activism in 2019, a process she describes as cathartic and essential to her healing. She says she and Tretta have been in touch since Brown’s shooting, talking about “stuff [they] I want to do when [they] return to campus.
“It makes me feel productive, like I’m doing something, especially when your trauma is tied to this big overarching issue that seems completely out of your control,” Weissman said.
She said it often takes people personally affected by gun violence to realize that prevention is “worth giving up guns” or “putting restrictions” on guns, but by then it’s too late.
Weissman says his message to Americans fighting gun reform is simple.
“The goal is not to take guns away from everyone,” 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 impact you if you’re a law-abiding citizen who just wants to defend yourself and so on.”
