Parkland: Birth of a Movement

by Dave Cullen

“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.

In the next six minutes, David demanded action twelve times. “Any action at this point, instead of just complete stagnancy and blaming the other side. . . . We’re children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action.” That was the moment. February 15, 2018, 8:22 a.m. EST. David Hogg called out Adult America for letting our kids die. The uprising had begun.

From the perpetrator’s point of view, many of these attacks are best understood as vengeful suicides: a profound hunger for suicide, coupled with the overwhelming desire to lash out, to demonstrate pain and power in a final act.

I just want people to understand what happened and understand that doing nothing will lead to nothing. Who’d have thought that concept was so difficult to grasp.”

“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us,” she said. “And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS.” She raised her fist and pumped it to each syllable, to wild screams: “WE! CALL! B! S!” As she repeated the chant, the audience yelled it with her: “They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.” She waved her notes in defiance at that last one, still wiping away the tears. Then she called on the audience to register to vote, to call their congresspeople, and to “give them a piece of your mind!”

Politicians were afraid of the NRA and its supposed political omnipotence, which would crush their careers if they dared step out of line. Reasonable gun owners were afraid of making modest concessions that they actually agreed with, because ceding the momentum would supposedly ignite a wave of dizzying defeats ending in the abolishment of the Second Amendment and the end of deer hunting. The NRA preached “Never give an inch.” Don’t support measures you agree with; support holding the line.