Such is the reach of America’s mass shooting epidemic that people who survived one mass shooting at their high school have to live through a second school shooting at their university. Or report on one for their jobs.

Joylyn Bukovac, the reporter covering Monday’s mass shooting at the private Covenant School in Nashville for NBC affiliate WSMV, had witnessed a shooting while attending high school in Alabama in 2010, she told viewers. In Monday’s mass shooting, a 28-year-old former student with two semiautomatic rifles and a handgun murdered three adults and three 9-year-olds. Along with describing her own experience, Bukovac offered advice for parents trying to help their children work through the trauma of a school shooting.

A mother who lived through last year’s mass shooting at a July 4 parade in the Chicago suburb Highland Park was also nearby the Nashville tragedy, visiting a friend who lost a son in the 2018 shooting at a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee, The Washington Post reports. 

The Highland Park mother, Ashbey Beasley, conveyed her own message after walking up to a bank of microphones outside Covenant School. “Aren’t you guys tired of covering this?” she asked. “How is this still happening? How are our children still dying?”

“I just was like, ‘I have to say something,'” Beasley, 47, told the Post. “Because I just feel like, how many more?” She explained she was on her way to meet her friend, Shaundelle Brooks, until Brooks called in a panic because her younger son’s school, near Covenant, was in lockdown. “I couldn’t even fully process it,” Beasley told the Post. “What do you say? Because only in America can you survive a mass shooting and go and make a friend who is the victim of a mass shooting and then go to meet that friend for lunch . . . and end up in the middle of another mass shooting event.”