The Parkland survivors emerged at just the right time for Cullen. He wrote the book “Columbine,” a deeply researched and thorough account of the 1999 massacre at a Colorado school that ushered in the era of school shootings. Years of covering shootings, being called as an expert talking head on shootings, writing and thinking about shootings have left Cullen with a diagnosis of “vicarious traumatization,” he writes, and twice in the last seven years he’s found himself sobbing and immobilized for days. Although he doesn’t say it explicitly, following the Parkland kids seems like a form of therapy for Cullen himself, and, he hopes, the nation. “There were no vacant stares from the Parkland survivors,” he writes. “This generation had grown up on lockdown drills — and this time, they were ready.”

[ Read our review of Dave Cullen’s “Columbine.” ]

With “Parkland,” Cullen aims for a straightforward inspirational story of a group of kids “healing each other as they fought.” They knew one another from drama club, and instinctively understood how to position themselves on a national stage. At a candlelight vigil, one of them introduced herself to the Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who connected her to a state senator, who helped the kids figure out how to get floor time at the statehouse. Another came up with #NeverAgain while he was on the toilet in his pajamas. The hashtag went viral and landed him on “Anderson Cooper 360” and NPR. Basically every time Emma Gonzalez opened her mouth, she went viral. And within a couple of weeks they had ambitions of planning a rally as big as the Women’s March.

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How or why these particular kids came to be so rapidly effective is not exactly clear from the book. Cullen partly chalks it up to generational wisdom. They understood news cycles and Twitter, viral videos and memes, and they set out to make themselves as relevant as possible. They understood they would be perceived as privileged white kids who live in gated communities, so they made alliances with groups that focus on urban school violence and shared the stage with them. They understood that no politician wants to be seen dismissing a kid who just saw his or her friends shot, so they staged as many showdowns as possible. In retrospect it seems extraordinary that all the pieces came together so effortlessly, yet even after reading the book I’m not exactly sure why this group of kids, at this particular moment.

In “Columbine,” Cullen punctured the lazy media narrative that the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were goth vigilantes, crusaders against bullies and mean girls. They were, he concluded, a psychopath and a depressive, and should be viewed through the lens of mental illness, and not school cliques and revenge — a point he’s repeated about many school shooters since. And partly thanks to Cullen, the rules of covering shootings have shifted. It’s become something of a taboo to spend too much energy on the psyche of the shooters, and definitely a taboo to glamorize their motives in any way.