Dave Cullen’s New Book on the Parkland Shooting Is Surprisingly Illuminating

After a gunman murdered 17 students and faculty on February 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Nicole Hockley was urging patience. Hockley had just flown to South Florida from California, where, as co-founder and managing director of the anti-gun-violence organization Sandy Hook Promise, she had been working to prevent the type of mass shooting that had just occurred in Parkland.

Hockley met me two days after the shooting, at a bagel shop in Coral Springs. I’d come to interview her for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, where I worked as an editor and reporter some 11 miles east of Stoneman Douglas. Patience, Hockley told me, would be crucial during the difficult time ahead for the shooting’s survivors and the victims’ families. Well-wishers and journalists needed to understand that grief manifests in innumerable ways, and that shared outrage and loss will lead to calls for action, some immediately, others gradually. Change will come, she insisted, though it likely will be at the grassroots level, small and incremental. Sandy Hook Promise, after all, spent more than a year researching gun violence, school safety, and mental health before implementing its platform.

“When the people are really ready to raise their voices and demand things, that’s when you’ll get change,” said Hockley, whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was killed in the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. “Until then, until people are really engaged, you’re not going to see meaningful change at [the state and federal] level.”

Read: What I saw treating the victims from Parkland should change the debate on guns