In 2019, Mia Tretta, then a high school freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, was struck in the stomach by a round from a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun fired by a schoolmate. Two students were killed during the attack, including her best friend, and two others were injured.
When she graduated from high school, she enrolled at Brown University, the scene of another shooting in December 2025, while she was studying for finals in her dorm room.
As messages flooded in about an active shooter on campus, she felt pain where she had been shot in the stomach. The college junior experienced a phenomenon she called “phantom bullet syndrome,” similar to phantom limb syndrome, in which someone senses something is there that is not. It occurs whenever she feels extremely stressed, she said.
“It’s crazy to say that the first time, I was the lucky one because though I got shot, I didn’t get killed,” said Tretta, now an anti-gun violence advocate who is studying public affairs and education. “And the second time, I was the lucky one because I was a few blocks away.”
Tretta represents a small but growing cohort of young people who have lived through more than one shooting. She also embodies the findings of a recent study that links gun violence exposure to chronic pain.
The study, published in BMC Public Health in January, found that …