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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% preventable.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

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........

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