Mia Tretta was in her dorm room with a friend at Brown University last Saturday when she got an alert warning about an emergency at the engineering building. She thought it couldn’t be a shooting. We all know now it was a shooting that killed two students and wounded nine. The Associated Press spoke with Mia on the phone on Sunday. What she said should shock us all. “No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two. And as someone who was shot at my high school when I was fifteen years old, I never thought that this was something I’d have to go through again.” Tretta was shot in the abdomen during a mass shooting in 2019 at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. Two students were killed; Mia and two other students were wounded.
There have been so many school shootings, I don’t remember the one at Saugus High School. As a journalist who follows the news closely, that speaks volumes about the tolerance Americans have for the damage guns are doing to their children and society as whole. It’s happening all the time. School lockdowns and active shooter drills are a routine part of being a student from elementary school to college. AP also reported on another Brown student, Zoe Weissman who went to a middle school next door to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida during the mass shooting there in 2018. She remembers hearing gunshots and screams. Since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, there have been over 435 school shootings in the United States according to an analysis by the Washington Post. The shootings resulted in 218 deaths, 512 injuries to children, educators and others. And it’s getting worse, in 2022 there were 46 incidents the highest since at least 1999.
Mia Tretta has tried to do something. After she graduated from high school, she pushed for stricter gun restrictions. She took a leadership role with the group Students Demand Action. She met with President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland. She’s working on a paper about students who have lived through shootings. Mia told the AP, “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. It’s happened again. And it didn’t have to.”
The gun culture is engrained in America’s DNA. The country was founded on the right to bear arms. Even though times and society have changed dramatically in the last 250 years, we refuse to see what it’s doing to the fabric of our society. It’s not just schools that have become shooting zones. We’ve all heard about shootings at churches, synagogues, malls, movie theaters, and concerts. Everyone is shocked and outraged, but that’s where it ends. We have all heard about the mass shooting in Bondi Beach, Australia where fifteen people were killed and twenty-seven were wounded when father and son gunmen targeted Jews celebrating Hanukah on the beach. Australia has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. The shooters had six legally purchased weapons. The Prime Minister is now calling for even stricter rules.
We are willing to tolerate guns and the pain and trauma they cause our children and our families. It will happen again.
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