It was not the first time some of them had barricaded themselves in a room at school.
The sight of law enforcement officers in tactical gear, sweeping campus for a gunman, was familiar.
So was the fear for several students who sheltered in place during Thursday’s deadly shooting at Florida State University and shared a traumatizing coincidence: they had endured the Parkland, Fla., school massacre in 2018.
Joshua Gallagher, a law student at Florida State who went to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, wrote on social media on Thursday that he never thought that gun violence would hit close to home again.
“Then I’m in the FSU Law Library,” where he heard an alarm: “active shooter on campus,” Mr. Gallagher wrote on X. “No matter your politics, we need to meet — and something has to change.”
Ilana Badiner, 21, who is graduating from Florida State in two weeks, said in an interview that she huddled in the student union basement with about 30 people during the shooting. In 2018, she was a student at a school adjacent to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. She said her school had been placed on lockdown for four hours.
“It was the same situation today, where people were just on the phones calling everybody and there were people crying,” she said. “It’s terrible that this keeps happening.”
In Parkland, 17 people were killed when a gunman, armed with a semiautomatic rifle and 300 rounds of ammunition, went on a rampage that lasted just under six minutes in a freshman building at the high school. Fourteen of them were students and three were faculty members. Another 17 people were injured in the shooting, one of the deadliest in American history, which fueled continuing calls for tougher gun control measures.
Fred Guttenberg, a vocal critic of existing gun laws who lost his 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, in the Parkland massacre, condemned what he said had been a lack of progress to prevent more shootings.
“America is broken,” Mr. Guttenberg wrote on social media on Thursday, pointing out that many of his daughter’s friends who survived the Parkland shooting were now seniors at Florida State. “As a father, all I ever wanted after the Parkland shooting was to help our children be safe. Sadly, because of the many people who refuse to do the right things about reducing gun violence, I am not surprised by what happened today.”
Jaclyn Corin and David Hogg, co-founders of March for Our Lives, a group led by students who survived the Parkland massacre, echoed Mr. Guttenberg’s criticism in a statement.
“No student should have to live in fear that their campus or classroom could be the scene of the next massacre or be forced to cower behind desks wishing they’d hugged their loved ones tighter before leaving for class,” they said. “We felt that pit in our stomachs years ago when we watched classmates gunned down.”
“We’re heartbroken and outraged that more young people had to endure that trauma today — including fellow Parkland survivors who are now at FSU and have been forced to relive our shared nightmare,” the statement said.
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
Adeel Hassan is a reporter and editor on the National Desk. He is a founding member of Race/Related, and much of his work focuses on identity and discrimination. He started the Morning Briefing for NYT Now and was its inaugural writer. He also served as an editor on the International Desk.
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