A deadly mass shooting at Brown University left two students dead and nine others injured on Saturday. One student, Mia Tretta, had survived a shooting in 2019 when she was shot in the stomach as a high school student. Her best friend was killed in the shooting, and she had selected Brown University for Rhode Island’s strong gun control laws. Now she has survived yet another school shooting. “Physically and emotionally, a school shooting takes your whole life and flips it upside down,” says Tretta, who criticizes politicians who refuse to enact meaningful gun reform. “We know that every single act of gun violence is 100 percent preventable.”
Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
A manhunt is continuing in Rhode Island after a deadly mass shooting at Brown University left two students dead, nine others injured. A person of interest had been detained but was released last night. In a statement on Sunday night, Brown officials said, quote, “Local police have advised they do not believe there is any immediate threat to Brown or the local community,” unquote.
The shooting occurred on Saturday shortly after 4 p.m., when a masked gunman opened fire inside a lecture hall filled with about 60 students. The campus was placed on lockdown as a manhunt began. Twelve hours later, a suspect was detained near the Providence airport in a hotel.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 391 mass shootings this year, including at least 75 school shootings.
This is Edward Wue, a junior at Brown.
EDWARD WUE: I think, absolutely, this is a huge wake-up call for everybody that, you know, has been affected and just everybody in the country, in general. I mean, gun violence is a huge issue, and this is truly so tragic that we’re seeing these events happen over and over again. And so, I think something definitely needs to be done. You know, what that may be, I think, is something to be figured out. It’s obviously a very difficult situation. You know, I hope, I truly hope, that we can figure something out.
AMY GOODMAN: At least two students at Brown had survived school shootings when they were younger. This is 20-year-old Zoe Weissman. In 2018, she was in the middle school next to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a former student opened fire, killing 17 students in Parkland, Florida.
ZOE WEISSMAN: You know, I have friends who survived the shooting in Oxford High School in Michigan and then went on to Michigan State University and then survived the shooting there. So I already knew that this was something that could happen. But again, you always have this naive belief that, like, “Oh, well, it won’t happen to me.” And obviously it has, and now there’s more kids like myself who have been through two school shootings. And I think that’s kind of just representative of the situation that the inaction of Congress has put us in.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by 21-year-old Brown University junior Mia Tretta. In 2019, she was shot in the stomach during a school shooting in Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. Her best friend, Dominic Blackwell, was one of the two students who died in that attack. Mia has been an advocate to reduce gun violence ever since. She worked with Everytown for Gun Safety, later joined the advisory board of Students Demand Action. She’s joining us now from Providence.
Mia, our deepest condolences on what has happened to your community, the two dead students and the nine, most of whom are critically injured in the hospital. Can you talk about what took place at Brown?
MIA TRETTA: Yeah, I mean, I, thankfully, was in my dorm at the time of the shooting. I was studying with a friend. But we got one text from another friend who wasn’t there, basically saying there’s an active shooter alarm going off in Barus and Holley, the engineering building. And pretty much as soon as we got that text, hundreds started rolling in, and they kind of didn’t stop for the coming hours. I was there in my dorm from the time of the shooting all throughout lockdown. The lockdown was lifted around 9 a.m. the next morning. And, I mean, I was, thankfully, in my dorm, where I had food and water, and I had my own things. But I had friends who were in basements alone. I had friends all across campus, in library hallways that they couldn’t leave, or stairwells.
So, it was just kind of a terrifying and confusing experience for everyone, especially when there was just kind of this lack of information. And when there’s a lack of information, rumors start. And, you know, we felt a lot more security in our campus as soon as we found out that the shooter had been detained. But, obviously, that’s not the case anymore, so now it’s just kind of back to this state of confusion and uncertainty, not sure if we’re fully safe. Yeah, there’s just so much going on, and especially with the lockdown lasting so many hours.
AMY GOODMAN: Mia, I just want to thank you for coming on this broadcast. I can’t imagine what you are going through and how this has triggered what you have gone through in the past. And I hate to do this, but I wanted to ask you to — since you’ve been so eloquent and brave over these last few years, since you survived yet another mass shooting. This was when you were a freshman at Saugus High School in 2019. If you can talk about how you’re doing right now, through this? I assume you are just operating on adrenaline at this point. I mean, you’re still in Providence, even though school — right? — has been canceled now, all classes, all tests. Kids are just going home?
MIA TRETTA: Yeah, I came to Brown as someone who was shot in the stomach at 15 years old. And when something as horrific and terrifying as a school shooting happens to you, you want to find as much sense of safety as possible, because, at least for me, it was — you know, my entire innocence, my childhood was taken from me by someone I didn’t even know. And a big reason I chose Brown was because of the safety I felt on campus, the community I felt, the fact that Rhode Island is a blue state that, you know, values gun laws. All of these things are reasons I chose Brown. And there’s this naive thought that it’ll never be me, it’ll never be me, and it’s something that I, of course, thought before my first shooting, and now kind of had to reassure myself that it will never happen again. But now a shooting being right here, two blocks away at my school, within my community, this place that I’ve kind of come to to feel safe, it’s kind of mind-boggling.
And unfortunately, we know that every single act of gun violence is 100% preventable. And this happened and my shooting at Saugus High School happened because of decades and years of government inaction. And it’s so unfortunate that so many people have to die for people to still not really care. There’s obviously been, you know, action taken, and there’s been so many powerful advocates across the country doing so much great work around gun violence prevention. But if we don’t have legislators in office and an administration that cares about children’s safety over guns and the gun lobby, we’re never going to be safe, and we’re never going to be able to walk down the street and feel secure that we’re not going to get shot and not make it home.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, anyone who experienced what you did as a freshman in high school could have just run away from all of this. You ran right towards it and took on this issue of gun violence. I was just reading a piece in The Brown Herald, a portrait of you, where you held — what? You set up a lemonade stand. In two days, you raised $8,000. And then you went on to the national stage. I want to go back to 2022 — what were you? Nineteen years old? — when you spoke at the White House.
MIA TRETTA: Eighteen, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Eighteen, when you spoke at the White House along President Biden.
MIA TRETTA: Ghost guns are untraceable, build-it-yourself firearms that look like a gun, shoot like a gun and kill like a gun, but have not been regulated like a gun. I’ve also learned that, as a student, I don’t just have to worry about Spanish tests, but about my life. School shootings with ghost guns are on the rise. And the most lasting thing I’ve learned, other than the loss of friends or the shattering of my youth, is that nothing has — that nothing has relieved the pain in my heart like working to prevent more senseless shootings.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Mia, that’s you when you were 18 at the White House talking about ghost guns. You keep saying every mass shooting is preventable. Explain. Because so often the political leaders who are pro-gun say, “Do not politicize a mass shooting like Brown. It’s just a tragedy. We offer our thoughts and prayers.”
MIA TRETTA: I mean, Brown is a tragedy. Every school shooting is a tragedy, and they should offer thoughts and prayers. But thoughts and prayers aren’t enough, and thoughts and prayers don’t bring back lives lost. They don’t prevent more lives from being taken.
We know that with more gun laws, gun crime and gun death goes down. Here in Rhode Island, we have some of the lowest gun crime in the entire United States, and that’s evident of the great gun laws that exist. And unfortunately, we also know that when we have Republicans in office, gun crime goes up.
We need people to see, you know, America is the only country that takes gun violence as this fact of life, and it makes no sense. It does not have to be. There’s no world where walking down the street and being scared, or sitting in a classroom and getting shot and killed, is normal. This doesn’t have to happen. Our politicians, they — we voted them into office, and their whole responsibility is to make sure that their people are safe and happy and healthy. None of those three things can exist when gun violence is constantly on the rise.
Gun violence and gun death is the leading cause of death for children. That just does not make at all sense to me. And I feel like, to most people, I’ve never heard someone say, “I wish there was more gun violence.” So, why don’t we do something about it?
AMY GOODMAN: Mia, you’re sitting there in your Brown sweatshirt. Again, you have survived a shooting in your stomach. How are you physically doing right now? And what are your plans, in this last minute we have? School’s out now. They’ve canceled it. They’re looking for the gunman. What are you going to do?
MIA TRETTA: Yeah, physically and emotionally, a school shooting takes your whole life and flips it upside down. I am still healing from my physical injuries, and it will be a process that probably takes my entire life. Every single doctor’s appointment, it is something else that has to come up, or even just if I’m getting something checked out that’s completely irrelevant to what happened to me, they have to know I was shot in a school shooting.
And with these, you know, coming days, I’m going to Massachusetts, and then I’m flying home on Wednesday, which will be great to see my family. And then, after winter break, I’m not entirely sure what campus will look like, what things will look like. You know, our student body needs —
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds, Mia.
MIA TRETTA: — support and community more than anyone — more than anything else right now. And I just hope that we can all come together as much as possible.
AMY GOODMAN: Mia Tretta, I want to thank you so much for being with us, a junior at Brown University, longtime gun safety advocate. She herself survived a shooting from Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. All, all the best to you. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
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