Dave Cullen is the author of the New York Times bestseller Columbine.

Since April 20, 1999, when 12 students and a teacher were gunned down at a high school in Colorado, I have covered most mass shootings in America in some capacity, and I have never seen anything like these Parkland kids. This one seems different—these young survivors are speaking out, and calling out the politicians who have done nothing for the past two decades.

When Columbine struck, I remember spending all afternoon and most of the first evening outside the school with students, and policy was the last thing on anyone’s mind. I was with them every day that week, and most of the next month, and gun control almost never came up.


It’s not that there weren’t opportunities for politics. In a chilling twist of fate, the National Rifle Association had scheduled its national convention for Denver 11 days after Columbine, and went ahead with it. Charlton Heston headlined. That provoked a brief flurry of outrage, and 7,000 protesters, including many from the school. Tom Mauser spoke movingly and carried a sign reading, “Don’t let my son Daniel’s death be in vain.” Mauser became a tireless advocate for gun safety that day, but he was such an anomaly he was pegged as the gun-control dad.

The Heston debacle came just as the national media were moving on. Too late. The window of outrage opportunity had just closed. And locally, it was dwarfed by a controversy closer to home. Fifteen crosses had appeared on the crest of Rebel Hill overlooking the school, and that same weekend, a victim’s father uprooted the two crosses dedicated to the killers live on CNN. The debate over that raged for days and dominated the conversation. Some students got engaged as well. But they were far too few, too late and too muted to rival the NRA.

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Columbine was not America’s first school shooting, but it escalated the genre drastically, igniting the epidemic of spectacle murders still plaguing us 19 years later, most recently in Parkland, Florida.

I spent 10 years working on my book about Columbine, and the next nine reporting on the escalating horrors it begat, and I was constantly asked why those killers did it. Now, so many school shootings later, the most common question I get is: What will end this? I’m fairly certain it will be a combination of things. Three changes top my list: Screening for teen depression in high schools, drastic changes to media coverage and significant gun safety laws. We’ve made virtually no progress on any of those, even the easy ones, and the gun situation has seemed most hopeless.

The NRA beat back what modest pressure there was after Columbine, and the gun lobby has won every fight since—even when it seemed the politics had finally moved against them. Momentum built after Virginia Tech, and Newtown felt like the moment—because that one was so unspeakable, but also because action was so overdue. Twenty kids—6- and 7-year-olds—and six of their teachers, were killed. Surely something would have to happen.

But the Obama administration made a tragic mistake in failing to take its time and develop a methodical plan. It misjudged the window of opportunity, badly, and missed it. Instead of building momentum for the next tragedy, Newtown devastated it. Around 80 percent of the country backs sensible gun legislation, but even mention the idea and we know what response we’ll hear: If the slaughter of 6-year-olds couldn’t do it … So Newtown became the clarion call of defeatism. People don’t even want to discuss it anymore—it’s just too frustrating, too hopeless. The vast, vocal majority gave up.

This time, the president barely even pretended to offer a meaningful response. On Twitter, he blamed the Russia investigation for supposedly diverting the FBI’s attention from a tip about the shooter. He waited nearly 24 hours to even acknowledge the massacre, and then responded with a soothingly poetic White House address that might have been pitch-perfect for 1999—consolation without a plan. Midway through his remarks, Trump said he wanted to speak directly to the children. “We are here for you. Whatever you need. Whatever we can do.” And then he proposed nothing.

Trump’s speech brought me back to the morning after Columbine, where students gathered for the first official post-horror assembly, at Light of the World Roman Catholic Church. A parade of local officials rise to address them, and I sat in the back row watching the kids sit there stone-faced, responding with courtesy applause, and remaining distraught. All the speeches were versions of Trump’s: Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you, everything will be all right. They didn’t want to hear that. Then their principal, Frank DeAngelis, got up and said the opposite: This was going to be really hard. “I’d like to take a wand and wipe away what you are feeling, but I can’t do that,” he said. “I’d like to tell you those scars will heal, but they will not.” He admitted he didn’t even know the way out of this horror yet, because no one had ever been there. But he assured them he would be beside them, as they figured it out together, and worked their way out. The applause was deafening. They just wanted the truth. And a leader who intended to lead.

This is why, to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivors, the president’s speech fell flat. Earlier that morning, one of them, David Hogg, had addressed Trump and Congress directly on CNN: “Please take action. We’re children. You guys are the adults.”

We couldn’t respond intelligently the day after Columbine or 9/11 or Oklahoma City because we had no idea why we had been attacked, what was going on or what was called for. In the immediate aftermath, consoling was all our leaders could do.

But at least back then, they were interested in understanding what had happened. After Columbine, the FBI quietly organized a landmark three-day summit in Leesburg, Virginia, gathering many of the leading forensic psychiatrists and criminologists in North America, along with representatives from dozens of prior school shootings: victims, school officials, first responders and associates of the perps. There had been small-scale school shootings going back three decades, so they studied them all. They took their time, and did it right. They continued to study the school shooting phenomenon and issued a landmark report the following year. Five years after Columbine, the Secret Service partnered with the Department of Education for an equally definitive report, which analyzed every major school shooting for a 26-year period and offered startling assessments: That there is no single profile of a school shooter; most perps aren’t loners, losers or outcasts and came from all social classes but shared a handful of striking commonalities: all were male, 98 percent had recently suffered a major sense of failure or loss, and most were clinically depressed. A stunning 78 percent had actually attempted suicide already, or had a documented history of talking about such plans. So by 2004, we understood who these killers were.

Now we’re in our 19th year of the spectacle murder epidemic and we’re tired of “leaders” consoling us. Comforting words ring hollow now. Victims like the Parkland students want to know: What are you going to do? These kids want no part of platitudes and patronizing, telling them it’s going to be OK. It’s not. They want politicians to step up and make change.

What makes two decades of federal inaction more galling is the contrast to the dramatic response of cops and schools. SWAT teams designed the Active Shooter Protocol, which revolutionized police response and has saved countless lives. Schools added security, restricted visitors and invented the lockdown drill, so that every student and teacher in America is now trained to respond to these attacks. Dramatic changes, accomplished within the first few years. Congress? Nothing but deflection: too soon to talk, mental health, thoughts and prayers. How do you know these deflections aren’t serious? Because nobody has done anything about mental health, an actual real need.

For those of us spending our lives on this issue, it’s been dispiriting. We couldn’t even get bump stocks banned after Las Vegas, the worst disaster yet, and when Sutherland Springs, Texas, followed right on its heels, it didn’t even get the usual attention. After just a few days coverage, we moved on. Did you know there was an attack in Kentucky last month? It was barely covered. Hopelessness is the pervasive feeling. Hopelessness at getting our leaders to act.

But they say alcoholics and drug addicts need to hit rock bottom to get the will to change, and so maybe despair was exactly the right setup for this week’s unlikely heroes: a bunch of high school kids.

Will they succeed where we failed? Will they stand up to Trump when he sits down with them this week, and politely but assertively tell him they don’t want his thoughts and prayers, they want a plan? Will they move him where others couldn’t? And will students and parents at every high school at risk, meaning every school in America, start showing up at congressional meetings and shouting their demands, calling out cowardice and inaction? Because that’s what it’s going to take.

It will be a long trek, but Saturday brought the most stirring and hopeful sight in 19 years covering this. With a speech that was eloquent in its raw anger, student Emma Gonzalez led a fired-up crowd of students chanting the new rallying cry: We call BS.

“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 … 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. 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.”

The kids just found the voice that has failed the rest of us for 19 years. Keep talking. You may finally be our way out.