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It’s rare for anyone to say they’ve lived through one mass shooting, let alone two.
But at just 20 years old, Zoe Weissman now belongs to a club that no one would ever choose to join.
The sophomore says she was in her dorm room on Brown University’s campus Dec. 13, when she got a frantic phone call from a friend. Weissman says she suspected right away that there’d been a shooting.
“That’s something my brain always goes to because of my trauma,” Weissman told As It Happens host, Nil Koksal.
In 2018, Weissman says she was outside the middle school next door when she heard the 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 with activism around gun violence prevention.
“I’m definitely more hyper-vigilant, more aware of my surroundings than my peers, and so I think that the second that I heard that there was an active shooter [at Brown University], I kind of went into like … survival mode,” said Weissman.
“I just kind of knew exactly what to do, and I think part of that is my generation grew up having lockdown drills and school shootings ingrained within us.”
As alerts began to pour in and it became clear the shooting was isolated to the university’s engineering building, Weissman says she went into fight-or-flight mode, locking and barricading her dorm room door.
The lockdown lasted until 6 a.m. the following morning. She says she spent those agonizing hours watching the news for updates and staying in contact with family members, who tried to keep her calm — once again.
“They were frustrated too,” said Weissman. “They were frustrated for me; they were frustrated that they had to go through it again as well.”
The shooting in Providence, Rhode Island, left two people dead and nine others injured.
It took police five more days to track down the alleged man behind the shooting, suspected to have killed a Massachusetts professor before taking his own life.
So far in 2025, there have been at least 394 mass shootings in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Weissman says she’s not only wrestling through grief and sadness, but anger and frustration.
“I think my experience is kind of indicative of the fact that if we allow gun violence to continue in America like this, this will be something that impacts everyone personally, and it already has impacted so many people personally,” said Weissman.
Turns out Weissman wasn ’t the only gun violence survivor at Brown University last Saturday.
Mia Tretta, 21, was shot in the abdomen by a classmate who killed two other people during a mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, in 2019. Now a junior at Brown, she was studying in her dorm room when her phone began buzzing with emergency alerts last Saturday.
“No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two,” Tretta told the Associated Press during a phone interview last Sunday. “And as someone who was shot at my high school when I was 15 years old, I never thought that this was something I’d have to go through again.”
Weissman, now a medical anthropology student, says experiences like these are part of what led her to become involved in gun violence prevention activism 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, talking 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 feels completely out of your control,” said Weissman.
She says, often it takes people being personally impacted by gun violence to realize that prevention is “worth giving up arms” or “having restrictions” on guns, but by then it’s too late.
Weissman says her message to Americans who fight gun reform is simple.
“The goal is not to take everyone’s guns away,” said Weissman. “The goal is to make sure that people who are willing to commit these crimes are not able to access guns, and that shouldn’t impact you if you’re a law-abiding citizen who just wants to defend yourself and what not.”
