Mia Tretta was 15 years old when she was wounded in the Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, California. On that day, a student opened fire on the campus quad, killing two students, one of whom was Tretta’s best friend, and wounding three others, including Tretta.
Just months after the shooting, Tretta, who is now 18, joined Everytown for Gun Safety’s Students Demand Action, a network with more than 500 groups of student activists across the country committed to ending gun violence.
As a survivor and activist, Tretta has advocated for gun safety, met with members of Congress to push for gun violence prevention methods, and introduced President Joe Biden at an event that celebrated federal action to help prevent the sale of ghost guns. She is also part of a group of Students Demand Action organizers who, over the past year, worked to engage other young Americans in the movement for gun safety via a partnership with Harry Styles’ Love on Tour.
Just days after last spring's tragic shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Styles announced his plans to team up with Everytown for Gun Safety. At the time, Styles said he was “absolutely devastated by the recent string of mass shootings in America,” up to and including Uvalde.
Beyond the partnership, Styles and Live Nation — the entertainment company that produced his Love on Tour — donated $1 million in proceeds from the tour to the Everytown Support Fund, the group’s education, research, and litigation arm.
In cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin, gun safety advocates and gun violence survivors with Students Demand Action met Styles’ fans at 44 shows. Whether handing out Students Demand Action wristbands to fans in line or setting up Student Demand Action tables in the concourse and encouraging fans to text "LOVE" to 644-33 — a system that connects interested folks with Students Demand Action staff who help them get plugged into local work — the organizers worked to spread their message and reach Styles’ fans, most of whom are young people.
Beyond engaging young people, the Styles and Everytown partnership inspired corporate engagement too. According to Everytown, the Moody Center in Austin donated $100,000 to the organization and put custom T-shirts on every single seat in the stadium for concert attendees.
The Styles and Everytown partnership was recognized by the concert industry as a success, winning a Pollstar Award for brand partnership/live campaign of the year.
Tretta, for her part, spread the word about Students Demand Action at a Love on Tour stop in Los Angeles in November. “People walking by were just so happy that we were there, happy that we were fighting for this cause, and really eager to sign up and learn more,” Tretta tells Teen Vogue.
She says fan reactions ranged from, “something as simple as, ‘Oh, my God! I'm so excited to use this hashtag, #endgunviolence, on my post later today with this backdrop,’ to ‘I'm going to sign up, I'm going to start a chapter in my school.’”
Tretta's been in touch with one group of fans from a nearby school, she adds, who want to start their own Students Demand Action chapter to help them with that process.
“It was great seeing how eager people were to kind of fight for what we believe in, what I've been fighting for for three years," she recalls. "And then, of course, we got to see the show, which was amazing.”
Tretta says she is grateful to Styles and his team for championing this issue and highlighting the role of young people in the fight for gun safety. And, she continues, the people she spoke with at the concert also appreciated Styles’ decision to get involved in the fight against gun violence.
“Obviously, most of the people going to Harry Styles are around my age — not everyone, but a good majority. I think hearing from other people your age is much more powerful than hearing from someone older or just reading a tweet or seeing a post about the next shooting," says Tretta. "I think it’s so much more powerful to have someone standing there in front of you who is doing something about this problem and realizing that you could too.”
Chloe Gayer, a Students Demand Action volunteer and fellow with the Everytown Survivor Network, decked out her car with information and drove roughly six hours from Iowa to Chicago to attend a Love on Tour show — her first concert ever.
“I got the text that asked if I wanted to go to Harry Styles, and I think my entire dorm building could hear me scream at the top of my lungs that I was very happy about it,” recalls Gayer, a student at Drake University. Of the partnership, she says, “It was amazing to be able to have an artist that I love as well as something that I am so passionate about.”
As a student survivor fellow, Gayer, who tells Teen Vogue she experienced abuse in a relationship that “involved firearms as a means of control,” shares her experience of domestic violence to empower other young people affected by gun violence and show her peers they’re not alone. She says she started advocating for gun safety when she was in eighth grade, after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And she’s been involved with campus initiatives to prevent teen dating violence and advocated for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which was signed by Biden last year.
Says Gayer, “It’s really powerful” that Styles decided to partner with Everytown. “He obviously knows who his audience is. The majority of us are Generation Z, a generation that has grown up surrounded by gun violence. I am a survivor of gun violence, but I also take into account that pretty much everyone in my generation has been affected by gun violence. We all grew up surrounded by mass shootings. I was eight years old when Sandy Hook happened, and so many others as I was growing up."
Gayer continues, "It’s very powerful to know that an artist who has an audience like he does, who has the standing that he does — and he isn’t even from the United States — is taking the time to stand with us. Even though it’s a very controversial issue, he’s using his platform to help save lives.”
Justin Funez, a national advisory board member with Students Demand Action, tells Teen Vogue that he is originally from Honduras and grew up around gun violence there and in Compton, California. He tabled at two Love on Tour concerts in Chicago, where he attends the University of Chicago. Many of the young people he spoke with at the concerts, he says, shared their own experiences of gun violence.
Says Funez, “Because it was a young audience, using the fact that gun violence is the number one killer of kids and teens in America, a lot of young people actually related.”
Though Styles isn’t from America, Funez says, it’s powerful that the pop icon is engaging in work to prevent gun violence here in the US: “It’s important for him to engage with these issues because it’s his fan base that this issue affects.”
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