Parkland - Dave Cullen Page 0,3

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.

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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 study 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.

The Parkland kids seem to have accidentally solved the problem of celebrity shooters simply by becoming bigger celebrities themselves. It took David Hogg twenty-four hours to become the first survivor to surpass his attacker in fame. Emma González went viral shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, the killer’s name has already been forgotten, and few people could pick him out of a lineup.

He is irrelevant, but his mental health issues are not. The Parkland kids talk