Fighting For Your Lives

Dave Cullen, The Author Of Columbine, Had Given Up On The Possibility Of Gun Reform In America. Then He Met The Students In Parkland.

- Nicole Goodkind

ON FEBRUARY 14, 2018, A FORMER STUDENT AT MARJORY Stoneman Douglas, a large public high school in the wealthy Parkland suburb of Miami, entered Building 12, the freshman building of his alma mater, and shot to death 17 people, including 14 children. It would become one of the top 10 deadliest shootings in U.S. history. Within hours, the media—now disturbingly efficient at this sort of story (it was the sixth school shooting in just 2018)—had descended on the sleepy Everglades city.

In New York City, Dave Cullen was alerted to the shooting by a slew of texts from TV producers asking him to join the talking heads on their various news programs. Following the enormous success of his 2009 bestseller, Columbine, Cullen had become the go-to “mass-murder guy,” he says, and he had grown tired of explaining why these shootings keep happening and why they would probably never stop. Then he saw David Hogg, a Parkland senior, on TV, and he knew: This was different.

That night on television, Americans heard little discussion of the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, and his motivations. Instead, they saw a group of remarkably poised and articulate teenagers repeating a unified message: We need gun control, and we need it now.

Within days, Cullen had flown down to Florida to meet with the Parkland students and activists who would later form March for Our Lives: Hogg, 17; Emma González, 18; Cameron Kasky, 17; and Jackie Corin, 17. He was there on a five-week assignment that turned into a yearlong project, culminating in his new book, Parkland: Birth of a Movement (HarperCollins).