In Nov. 2019, a gunman walked into Saugus High School, opened fire, and killed two students.

Mia Tretta was a freshman at Saugus. She was wounded in that mass shooting, and, since then, has been an activist against gun violence in our country.

LA Times Anita Chabria wrote about Tretta’s fight for gun control. They joined Lisa McRee on “LA Times Today.”

Tretta recalled the day of the shooting. 

“I was chatting with my friends, talking just like every other day. Only a couple of minutes had passed when we heard the first bang. Another bang came, and I found myself on the ground. I got up and used my instincts to run. I ran across campus, up two flights of stairs to my favorite teacher’s classroom. From there, I was ambulanced to a nearby park and airlifted to Holy Cross Hospital. It wasn’t until later that night I found out I was shot in the abdomen with a 45 caliber ghost gun by a boy I didn’t know. And my best friend who I was talking to before the shooting had died,” she remembered.

After the shooting, Tretta became involved with Everytown for Gun Safety. Her activism took her all the way to the White House. 

“In April of last year, President Biden did his ghost gun federal regulation, saying that ghost guns need to be serialized… I was invited to go speak in the Rose Garden and introduce [Biden] as he introduced the regulation, as well as Steve Dettelback to be the new ATF director. It was a very sad day because I wish I was there because I am the best knitter in the world or because I did this amazing science fair project. But I’m there because of a sad thing. I’m so happy that President Biden and our administration is so amazing and really cares about our country and cares about the gun violence epidemic. At the same time, I wish I could go back to November 13th of 2019, make none of this ever happen, and I could be a normal high-schooler,” she said.

Chabria observed that systemic reform may have to come from Tretta’s generation, who have been so deeply impacted by mass shootings in their lives.

“Our president trying his hardest, you see our governor trying his hardest. The LA County supervisors recently are trying to pass some laws. They will all be challenged in court. And we have a Supreme Court that is very certain of their view of the Second Amendment. I don’t think that this is a problem that we are able to address with our current politics. And I do think it will involve voting out the politicians who don’t want to have gun safety. And I think that does lie with Mia’s generation,” Chabria said.

Tretta talked about the emotional scars she carries from the shooting.

“There’s the trauma of losing your best friend, which is incomparable to anything I’ve experienced in my life. And then there’s the trauma of being at school, a place where you’re supposed to be safe and spend six, seven, eight hours a day and be able to just go there and learn. But that was ripped away from you by someone I didn’t even know, because of these easy access to weapons. There’s no handbook that you’re given when you’re in the hospital for a bullet wound,” she said. “There’s 4,000 stories of that campus, not to mention our whole community. Everyone really was impacted differently, will have a different traumatic response and has to heal differently. And we can lean on each other as much as we can, but no person’s the same.”

Watch the full interview above.

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