Oxford High. Sandy Hook. For some Michigan State students, shootings are nothing new.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — As a gunman’s bullets erupted on the vast Michigan State University campus late Monday, killing three students and injuring five other people, some students felt a chilling sense of familiarity: They had lived through this before.

As children, some had been close to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. Or survived the Oxford High School shooting in a nearby township outside of Detroit in November 2021. Now, as young adults, they had made it to college, and it was happening all over again.

“It’s so surreal,” said Emma Riddle, an 18-year-old freshman at Michigan State who was on campus on Monday, and in her senior year at Oxford High when a 15-year-old killed four fellow students. “We just went through this 14 months ago. What is happening?”

As the manhunt for the Michigan State shooter continued for close to three hours on Monday night, Willie Charleston said he was woken by his roommate, and the two huddled in their dorm room. They became increasingly alarmed, listening to police scanner traffic and hearing calls that the gunman was just outside his building.

Mr. Charleston, 18, went to high school only a short drive from Oxford. After the shooting there, things at his school changed immediately. A police officer was suddenly stationed at school. It was harder to walk on and off campus. Visitors appeared to be screened more strictly at the front office.

“What happened last night is just a reminder that this happens all the time,” Mr. Charleston said. Not long before the shooting on Monday, he was on a campus bus, he said, when the lettering on a fellow passenger’s sweatshirt caught his eye: “Oxford Strong.”

Other students said that Monday’s shooting, which left three people dead and five injured, was only their latest brush with gun violence. Spencer Ances, 18, is a freshman from Southbury, Conn., next door to Newtown, where 26 people were killed — including 20 students — at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012.

“We’re prepared,” he said. “Lock the doors, barricade it. We didn’t need advice on that.”

On Monday night, Mr. Ances’s mother asked him if he wanted to fly home, because classes had been canceled for the rest of week. “She was just like, ‘Again,’” he said. “The same thing.” He decided to go home.

Sophia Lada contributed reporting.