by Dave Cullen
Dedication
For the seventeen people murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School:
Alyssa Alhadeff, Scott Beigel, Martin Duque, Nicholas Dworet, Aaron Feis, Jaime Guttenberg, Chris Hixon, Luke Hoyer, Cara Loughran, Gina Montalto, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Meadow Pollack, Helena Ramsay, Alex Schachter, Carmen Schentrup, and Peter Wang
And for all of the March for Our Lives kids, and all you young activists inspired by them to get off your butts to make something change
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part I: Uprising 1: Valentine’s Day
2: Lightning Strike
3: #NeverAgain
4: Tallahassee
5: Spring Awakening
6: Back to “Normal”
Part II: Building a Movement 7: Peace Warriors
8: Strategy
9: Change the Ref
10: Exhausted
11: Walkout
12: The Memes Men
13: Harvard
14: March for Their Lives
15: PTSD
Part III: The Long Road 16: Denver Noticed
17: Setbacks
18: Graduation
19: Road to Change
20: Homeward Bound
21: The Third Rail
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Notes on Sources
About the Author
Also by Dave Cullen
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
1
Gun country. Half the country. Fighting them, provoking them, alarming them, was doomed to failure, more failure, decades of failure—they had to try something new. They had to engage them. So Jackie Corin had come to North Carolina six weeks after escaping her high school, but she was scared. It was just one guy. One guy was all it took. “It was nerve-racking, because there was a guy staring me down and . . .” He was an older white guy with gray hair under an NRA cap. “An average-looking grandpa,” she said. “He just had a blank stare on his face the whole time, like I couldn’t tell if he was there to hear us out or he was coming to make some chaos.”
Jaclyn Corin, more comfortable as Jackie, is a petite blond teenager with fair skin, flowing hair, and a soprano voice that doesn’t carry in crowds. But she has a presence. After she spoke, Jackie left the podium but remained seated onstage, out in the open. Just like the kids at her high school who were no longer at her high school, because they had been in the open. “The people that went to the bathroom in the freshman building, they were easy targets,” she said. Jackie had just left the freshman hallway when that jerk started shooting. “It was all about timing. I literally walked out the doors that he walked into; it was like a span of fifteen minutes . . .” She didn’t complete the thought, but couldn’t stop picturing it.
Jackie’s new friend Sarah Chadwick spoke after her at the rally, and then local college kids energized by their visit took the stage. The scary guy’s eyes barely skimmed them, they just kept burrowing into her. “I felt like he was going to pop out a gun the whole time,” she said. Alert security? Say what to security? And there was hardly any security.
Just four days earlier, Jackie had spoken to hundreds of thousands filling Pennsylvania Avenue, plus huge banks of TV cameras, but the contrast only heightened her fear. “Obviously, the march on Washington was very well protected,” she said. “There was so much security, I was like, ‘OK, if something happens to me onstage, the whole world’s going to see it.’ But at this event, there weren’t really a lot of people there to react.”
The march on Washington had been covered as the culmination of their movement, but the kids had engineered it as a launchpad. Where they were headed was still hazy—they were making it up as they went along. But they had an instinct. Jackie had come to North Carolina as part of an intentional sharp right turn. She had arrived with two objectives: to rally the waves of young new supporters eager to join the movement, but also to engage Second Amendment warriors. Preaching to the converted was easy. The real slog, if they wanted to get serious, was to convince hunters, collectors, and enthusiasts that no one was coming for their guns. They would not convince them today, or this year. But eventually. It didn’t feel safe, though, and Jackie couldn’t wait to get out.
Jackie’s fear has since faded, but it lurks and swells unpredictably, in waves of silent terror that can knock her back at any moment. Fear was a constant stealth companion in the first strike she engineered in Tallahassee, the five-week sprint to the March for Our Lives (MFOL) in Washington, DC, and the grueling Road to Change bus tour, consolidating their network all summer along ten thousand miles of American highway. Fear was with her all the way to the midterms, which were their primary objective from that first weekend, when they concluded they would never break the logjam on gun legislation without changing some legislators. And putting the rest on notice.
It’s a particular sort of fear Jackie shares with survivors of Columbine and the Pulse nightclub shooting. Most mass shootings end within fifteen minutes, but Jackie and her friend Cameron Kasky were crouched in lockdown on the day of the shooting for three and a half hours. Throughout it, they got updates on the carnage by text and Twitter, as seventeen students and staff were murdered around them—long enough to ride the waves of panic, fear, and helplessness to settle on simmering rage. By the time Jackie and Cameron hit their beds that night, this movement was in motion.
It was speed that launched this movement, and a breadth of talent that packed its punch. That first night, Cameron, Jackie, and David Hogg started simultaneously on separate tracks to completely different movements, which they fused forty-eight hours later to form a juggernaut. Cameron’s first and best move was assembling talent. By Saturday, when Emma González went viral, two dozen creatives were conjuring up a new movement in Cam’s living room.
I spent ten months shadowing these kids, and they were relentless, frequently racing around the country in opposite directions. That was their secret weapon: waging this battle on so many fronts with a host of different voices, perspectives, and talents—healing each other as they fought.
2
I swore I would never go back. I spent ten years researching and writing Columbine, and discovered that post-traumatic stress disorder can strike even those who have not witnessed a trauma directly. First responders, therapists, victim advocates, and journalists are among the vulnerable professions, but I had never heard of secondary traumatic stress, or vicarious traumatization (VT), until it took me down, twice, seven years apart. I learned that it comes in many forms, that PTSD is very specific, and less common than depression, which struck me. I was sobbing all day, mostly in bed, then slumped in a chair, unable to work effectively, or to do much of anything. That’s when I agreed to some of my shrink’s terms: read no victim stories the first week after a tragedy; watch no TV tributes or interviews with survivors unless I promised to hit the mute button if I started to feel the warning signs. I could study the killers at will, because they didn’t burrow inside me—it was the survivor grief that did me in.
Even years after Columbine, I had no idea it had drawn me in for life. Since that day, I have tracked every major tragedy in some capacity as a journalist—but always at a distance of either time or space. In the immediate aftermath, I engage with a cadre of mental health and criminology experts, and with countless informal survivor networks, especially the many Columbine survivors I now count as friends. Months, or preferably years, later, I have gone back to the scene of some of the worst crimes. I work with John Jay College’s Academy of Critical Incident Analysis (ACIA), which brings a small team of experts and survivors togethe
r for a three-day study of one critical event each year. I studied the Virginia Tech and Las Vegas tragedies on-site, and Norway’s 2011 Worker’s Youth League attack from New York City. But I could never plunge back into the scene of the crime while the wounds were still raw. Nor could I bear the prospect of documenting horror another time.
Parkland changed everything—for the survivors, for the nation, and definitely for me. I flew down the first weekend, but not to depict the carnage or the grief. What drew me was the group of extraordinary kids. I wanted to cover their response. There are strains of sadness woven into this story, but this is not an account of grief. These kids chose a story of hope.
The Parkland uprising seemed to erupt out of nowhere, but it had been two decades in the making. The school-shooter era began at 11:17 a.m. MDT, on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School, in Jefferson County, Colorado. There is a photograph that became iconic, which I described in Columbine: a blond girl, head thrown back in anguish, caught by her own hands, palms against her temples, fingers burrowing into her scalp. Her mouth is open, eyes squeezed shut. She mirrored what I witnessed when I arrived that first afternoon: girl, boy, parent, teacher—everyone clenching something: their hands, her knees, his head, each other. But nothing prepared me for the same kids the next morning. Their eyes were dry, their faces slack. Their expressions had gone vacant. That’s why I’m still on the story two decades later: I never wanted to see that look again. But what we see today is worse: unsurprised survivors who expected a shooter.
The media coverage of Columbine was unprecedented. CNN logged its highest ratings ever, and the New York Times covered the story on its front page for nine straight days. It was an exceptional moment, demanding exceptional action. Law enforcement and the education system responded with significant changes, including the Active Shooter Protocol, and then . . . we came to accept it.
There were no vacant stares from the Parkland survivors. This generation had grown up on lockdown drills—and this time, they were ready.
3
Sadly, I’ve become a talking head: the mass-murder guy whom reporters and producers call to interview after every big shooting. Minutes after I learn of a new horror, I know whether the media will play it as a megastory or a minor one—because our media runs in only two gears. My phone is soon exploding, or it’s silent. It melted down on Valentine’s Day 2018.
Fifty-four minutes after the shooting started, I learned about it by a text from an Anderson Cooper 360° producer. “Another fucking school shooting,” she wrote. That was fast, and not because of the carnage. It was something entirely different; something the producer was sensing, but couldn’t put her finger on. “This one feels like Columbine,” she said. Producers kept repeating versions of that all afternoon: The images look strangely familiar. Why?
I felt it too, and was equally puzzled at first. Parkland wounded America again, even before we met David, Emma, or Jackie, because it took us back to Columbine in a way that none of the intervening horrors had. We can all picture that ghastly footage of Columbine kids running for cover with their hands on their heads, men in black with swat stamped on their jackets motioning them with assault rifles to line up for pat-downs. Victims as suspects. Yet we had gone nearly two decades without seeing this horrifying sight again, because after Columbine, law enforcement threw out the old rulebook and developed the Active Shooter Protocol. Now police charge in immediately, and these spectacle murders end abruptly. Of the horrors post-Columbine, only one lasted more than fifteen minutes. Most perpetrators die in the act, often by their own hand, as authorities close in. The Pulse nightclub attack was the exception, raging for nearly four hours, but it unfolded while most of the nation slept. Orlando police tweeted that the killer was dead before dawn.
Most of these tragedies are reported in the past tense. By the time news hits the national networks, it’s over. Columbine was different, and now Parkland was too. In both cases, the killing actually ended quickly—but the fear dragged on for hours. Columbine began at 11:17 a.m. Denver time, and played out on national television as a murderous hostage standoff until a SWAT team reached the library, and police announced at a 4:00 p.m. news conference that the killers’ bodies had been found. The Parkland shooting began at 2:21 p.m. EST, but the perpetrator fled the campus and escaped. That is exceptionally rare. He was picked up around 3:40 and then arrested, but there was doubt for some time about whether he was the right man, and the only man. It was three and a half hours before the SWAT team cleared the last classrooms and gave the all clear.
Americans respond to most mass shootings with shock and grief. Columbine and Parkland provoked fear. Hours of fear. Human responses to those emotions are dramatically different. Fear floods the brain with norepinephrine, a hormonal cousin of adrenaline, which appears to be a primary culprit in the genesis of PTSD. “The outpouring from the adrenal gland and the related chemicals already in pathways in the brain appear to be implicated in the creation of trauma memory,” said Dr. Frank Ochberg, a trauma expert.
A confession. Just three months before Parkland, one of the worst shootings ever—(can we stop awarding them titles?)—tore apart the town of Sutherland Springs, Texas, and I turned away. Twenty-six people were killed in a church, which made it worse, but when a friend relayed the info from the back seat of a car, I asked how bad it was, said “That’s horrible,” and changed the subject. Much of the country had begun to do the same.
Journalists were sensing the malaise or feeling it themselves, and had been scaling back coverage. The Trace, a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom that reports on gun violence in America, analyzed news coverage of Parkland against the seven deadliest shootings in the prior five years. The Pulse shooting in 2016 seems to have been the point when millions of Americans decided they couldn’t bear it anymore. Nothing ever changed, except the body count, which kept rising. The Onion famously reruns the same headline after every time: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
Hope for gun reform swelled after Columbine, but even the Colorado legislature failed. Guns laws actually grew much looser when the federal assault weapons ban expired five years later. Virginia Tech brought another push, which didn’t quite get there—but momentum seemed to be building. Finally, Newtown was such a horror that gun safety advocates were sure something substantial would pass. No. That defeat felt like the death knell of hope. Polls indicated huge majorities favoring several gun reforms, but most of us went silent about them. Even raising the possibility of closing the gun show loophole or fixing the background-check system drew eye rolls and jabs about political naivete. A new assault weapons ban, or limiting large-capacity magazines, ideas heavily supported by the public, drew jeers. The NRA kept introducing new bills to weaken gun laws, and they were passing in legislatures around the country. The opposition folded. If dead six-year-olds couldn’t change this downhill course, it was hopeless.
So when the Las Vegas massacre obliterated all records in October 2017, it drew intense coverage, but for only a few days. Sutherland Springs came just a month later. Two months after that, two students were killed and sixteen wounded at Marshall County High in Kentucky, and the media barely bothered. I’m their go-to mass-murder guy, and I didn’t even hear about it until the next day.
Paradoxically, the fog of defeatism wouldn’t smother the Parkland uprising but fuel its lift-off. And it felt so amazing once the fog suddenly lifted. An axiom of addiction is that you have to hit rock bottom before you are ready to take on the harsh reality of recovery. America had hit rock bottom.
4
A brief note on names: I use first names for the Parkland kids, and other youth activists, because that’s who they are: they’re kids. One name will not appear in this book: that of the killer, who quickly grew irrelevant. Although he inadvertently set off an uprising, he is of little significance himself. We must examine the perpetrators as a class, both to spot threats and address underlying causes. And it’s fruitful to stud
y influential cases—influential to subsequent killers—particularly the false narrative of the Columbine killers as heroes fighting for the bullied and outcasts everywhere. Most of the perpetrators buy into that myth, which is why it’s imperative that the media avoid creating new ones by jumping to conclusions too soon. Sadly, Columbine ignited the school-shooter era, which we’re still dealing with, and it’s getting much worse. While keeping top-ten lists of these massacres is part of the problem, it’s notable that Columbine no longer even makes that list. For the first fifteen years or so of that era, the first question I got, and the most consistent and insistent, was always “Why?” Why did the Columbine killers do it, or what drove these killers collectively? What were the patterns, what were the causes? That changed rather abruptly, in the mid-2010s. It wasn’t immediately after Newtown, but further in its wake, after the defeatism had set in, and the horrors grew worse and worse: Pulse, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs. The question I get now is always some variation of “How do we make this stop?”
After two decades of research based on the voices of victims and victim advocates, and responses from the best minds in academia, psychology, criminology, and journalism, plausible roads out seem clear: major reforms to the easy access to deadly weapons and ammunition; a targeted approach to mental health in the form of screening for teen depression, every semester, in every high school in the country; and a major change in the media’s coverage of these killers, which lionizes them in the eyes of unraveling future perps. It may take a combination of these strategies, and of course the smart money is on doing all three. Yet in twenty years, America alone has lost 683 lives in 81 mass shootings, and we’ve done virtually nothing. Concealed-carry and a host of other laws have made quick access to guns easier and easier. The “mental health” component has always been addressed with that absurdly broad label, so of course we have failed to move an inch. Only the media angle has begun to show some progress, or at least the early rumblings, in which journalists are beginning to accept our role in the star-making cycle.
