As federal and local authorities in Providence, Rhode Island, continue searching for the person who killed two Brown University students and injured nine others on Saturday, campus members and the broader community are grieving and dealing with a shattered sense of safety.

But for 21-year-old Brown University junior Mia Tretta, it’s familiar territory.

In 2019, as a 15-year-old high school student, she was shot in the abdomen during a mass shooting that left her close friend Dominic Blackwell and another student, Gracie Anne Muehlberger, dead. She and two other students were injured.

On Saturday, Tretta and her roommate were in their dorm room at Brown when they began getting texts about an active shooter in the university’s engineering building. At first, she wasn’t sure how seriously she should take the warnings. “I assumed – the fire alarm goes off all the time and there’s no fire – but then we started getting hundreds of texts,” Tretta said.

Then came a message from the university telling students to “Run, hide, fight”. The school went into lockdown, which lasted until the next morning.

“It was terrifying, and it was terrifying for my friends who were there,” she said. “It’s terrible that this happened at Brown, but it’s not surprising, at all. This has happened all over the country and it’s only a matter of time before it happens to everyone.”

Since surviving the shooting at Saugus high school in Santa Clarita, California, Tretta, now 21, has thrown herself into gun violence-prevention activism, speaking at vigils and rallies. Four years ago, she spoke to the Guardian about the need for federal regulation of homemade firearms, known as ghost guns, one of which was used to shoot her in 2019.

“In my situation, we still don’t know who bought the gun. We know who used it, but we can’t trace it back,” Tretta said in 2021. “I want people to use my story to show what happens when anyone can get a gun.”

Mia Tretta in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington DC on 11 April 2022, with then president Joe Biden. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Gunshot wounds are now the No 1 cause of death for teens in the US, with Black youth living in the nation’s most underserved neighborhoods facing the highest risk. While shootings and homicides have been on a steady decline since the high of 2020-2021, in 2025 there have so far been nearly 400 incidents where four or more people, excluding the shooter, were hit by gunfire, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

“[Gun violence] has impacted every part of my life and it will continue to,” Tretta said. “The current politicians we have, their sole job is to keep us safe, and if we can’t walk to the supermarket or go to class and not be afraid of being shot, they’re not doing their job. I don’t know what it’s going to take for people – especially politicians – to do something.”

Tretta is part of a small but growing cohort of young adults who have survived more than one mass shooting. A fellow Brown student who survived this weekend’s shooting, Zoe Weissman, 20, was 12 years old when she witnessed a shooting at the high school adjacent to her middle school in Parkland, Florida; that 2018 shooting left 17 people dead.

At least two students who survived the 2021 mass shooting at Oxford high school in Michigan had to endure another school shooting years later at Michigan State University, where a gunman killed three students and injured five others in 2023.

Days before the shooting at Brown, Tretta was in Washington DC, where she performed a song at the national vigil for all victims of gun violence, which was organized by the Newtown Action Alliance, a non-profit founded in the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school. She recalled hearing from dozens of people, some of whom had lost their loved ones to shootings and others, like her, who had been injured by bullets.

The gathering reminded her that shootings and violence don’t discriminate.

“Unfortunately, gun violence doesn’t care whether you’ve been shot before, or are at the fanciest of Ivy League institutions or [in] the inner city. Gun violence doesn’t care,” she said.