On December 13, 2025, Brown University faced an unimaginable tragedy while students were studying for final exams. A gunman entered the Barus and Holley Building, which houses Brown’s School of Engineering, and shot eleven students, killing two of them. The following day, families and friends of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting victims were grieving, 13 years after the horrific event, which killed 27 people, most of whom were six- and seven-year-old students.
The young child victims of Sandy Hook would have been college-aged students today, around the same age as Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, the students who were killed in the Brown shooting. Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, has continuously faced the threat of school and mass shootings, something they’ve dealt with their entire lives.
From the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 to the Virginia Tech University shooting in 2007, to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018, to the Robb Elementary School shooting in 2022, school shootings have sadly become a normal part of our reality, with Gen Z, also known as the lockdown generation, being the first to experience active shooter drills in schools.
The reality is that school shootings are happening more frequently and have drastically increased from before the COVID-19 pandemic to the present. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, there were 52 school shootings. Of course, in 2020, the country was in quarantine for most of the year; however, there were still 22 school shootings. The number then spiked in 2021, with 74 school shootings. The year with the most school shootings was 2024, with 83. In 2025, as of December 13, there have been 75 school shootings.
Due to mass school shootings happening so often, many members of Gen Z are survivors of multiple school shootings. Two survivors of the Brown University shooting spoke out publicly about surviving multiple mass shootings while still students.
In 2018, Zoe Weissman was just 12 years old, attending West Glades Middle School in Parkland, Florida, right across the street from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, when the high school experienced a mass shooting that took the lives of 17 and injured 18. Even though she wasn’t inside the high school during the shooting, she witnessed a great deal from the outside. In an interview with The Cut, she described what she saw that day, which ultimately led her to develop PTSD.
Weissman said to Andrea González-Ramirez, a senior writer for The Cut: “I was outside with my friends working on a project for a class. When the shooting started, we were out of our teacher’s view, so she wasn’t able to get us into her classroom before she had to close the doors. The class had about 35 students, and in the heat of things, she didn’t realize that a few of us were missing. The lockdown procedures were very unclear. We didn’t hear any alerts or any screaming.
We only realized something was happening when we saw the first responders and then heard a few pops… About a minute after that, we heard a lot of pops in a row, followed by people screaming. I now assume there must have been a bunch of kids hopping the fence onto my school’s campus to get away. Once we heard that, we went to our classroom door, which was closed. I started screaming. Thankfully, a security guard heard us and let us in.”
Amidst the pain and trauma that impacted Weissman, she became a gun control activist, and when she was in high school, she became the president of Parkland’s March for Our Lives chapter.
The emotion she experienced after surviving her second school shooting was primarily anger, as she never thought this would happen to her again. However, she hopes that at least something impactful can come out of her journey, and she is also hopeful that more people will pay attention to the issue of gun violence in America. She believes that people seeing a survivor of two school shootings could have more empathy for the tragedy.
In 2019, Mia Tretta was a freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, when she and four other students were shot by a fellow classmate. Two were killed before the gunman turned the gun on himself.
Tretta was hospitalized and survived the shooting. She later became a gun reform advocate and joined the team at Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit organization that advocates gun control legislation to pass in all fifty states. Her work in gun reform did not stop once she arrived as a student at Brown University; she was the school’s chapter president of Students Demand Action, a youth organization under Everytown.
She once again faced a shooting at her school, this time at Brown University. She never thought she’d experience this again. Tretta told The Washington Post that “I found a place where I finally started to feel comfortable.” That is no longer the case for her.
Now, she is witnessing her fellow classmates go through the same thing she experienced years prior. The impact of her first school shooting is still powerful, and now that she has experienced it a second time, she can help her classmates through the grief. It’s something she wishes she didn’t have to do.
There was a different fear for Tretta with the shooting at Brown University. When she was shot by her classmate at Saugus High School, law enforcement quickly identified the shooter. This time, she was on lockdown for hours, and they didn’t find the shooter until days later, when he was discovered dead.
Mass school shootings in our country have impacted so many members of Generation Z. There are many who haven’t experienced a school shooting but have a constant fear that it could happen to them. Elijah Williams, a student at Howard University in Washington, DC, and a graduate of Fuquay-Varina High School in North Carolina, expressed that the recent shooting at Brown had a huge impact on him.
“It really opened my eyes that it can really happen anywhere, at any time,” Williams said. “The semester was almost over; students were getting out for the holidays. It sets in a new fear that it doesn’t have to be daylight, the middle of the semester, or earlier in the semester. It can really happen at any time, at any place.”
The unfortunate reality is that younger Americans have become desensitized to school shootings. This is true for Williams, as he expressed: “Whenever I hear about another shooting, especially another school shooting, it honestly gets to the point where it makes me feel really sad, but I can’t let it consume me because it’s become so frequent, especially as of late. I hate to say this, but it’s just another day in the news…it happens so often that it loses impact.”
This is true for so many Americans, particularly the lockdown generation. School shootings shouldn’t be normal; they shouldn’t be just another day in the news, but that is what they’ve become based on how frequently the tragedy occurs.
The physical and mental health of many young Americans is affected by mass school shootings. For survivors and the families and friends of the victims, this has consumed many aspects of their lives. It might feel incredibly hopeless for those who see the lack of effort in gun reform legislation from their lawmakers. Even with the rise in school shootings in the last few years, major gun control legislation has not been implemented on a national level by either the Democratic or Republican Parties.
However, if you are passionate about this topic, get involved in advocacy, reach out to local-, state-, and national-level politicians to express your concerns and explain how you want to see policy change, and consider a future in politics to ensure that you are working toward real solutions.
If you are interested in advocacy work, there are many organizations working to fight for gun control legislation, such as Everytown for Gun Safety, with Students Demand Action and Moms Demand Action under the organization’s network. There is also March for Our Lives, an organization led by young people and founded by the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting.
Your impact could save the lives of many Americans; your participation in different parts of our democracy could eventually lead to substantial policy change. The eventual results of major gun reform legislation will move Generation Z away from the identity, the Lockdown Generation.
