Parkland - Dave Cullen Page 0,2
head: the mass-murder guy whom reporters and producers call to interview after every big shooting. Minutes after I learn of a new horror, I know whether the media will play it as a megastory or a minor one—because our media runs in only two gears. My phone is soon exploding, or it’s silent. It melted down on Valentine’s Day 2018.
Fifty-four minutes after the shooting started, I learned about it by a text from an Anderson Cooper 360° producer. “Another fucking school shooting,” she wrote. That was fast, and not because of the carnage. It was something entirely different; something the producer was sensing, but couldn’t put her finger on. “This one feels like Columbine,” she said. Producers kept repeating versions of that all afternoon: The images look strangely familiar. Why?
I felt it too, and was equally puzzled at first. Parkland wounded America again, even before we met David, Emma, or Jackie, because it took us back to Columbine in a way that none of the intervening horrors had. We can all picture that ghastly footage of Columbine kids running for cover with their hands on their heads, men in black with swat stamped on their jackets motioning them with assault rifles to line up for pat-downs. Victims as suspects. Yet we had gone nearly two decades without seeing this horrifying sight again, because after Columbine, law enforcement threw out the old rulebook and developed the Active Shooter Protocol. Now police charge in immediately, and these spectacle murders end abruptly. Of the horrors post-Columbine, only one lasted more than fifteen minutes. Most perpetrators die in the act, often by their own hand, as authorities close in. The Pulse nightclub attack was the exception, raging for nearly four hours, but it unfolded while most of the nation slept. Orlando police tweeted that the killer was dead before dawn.
Most of these tragedies are reported in the past tense. By the time news hits the national networks, it’s over. Columbine was different, and now Parkland was too. In both cases, the killing actually ended quickly—but the fear dragged on for hours. Columbine began at 11:17 a.m. Denver time, and played out on national television as a murderous hostage standoff until a SWAT team reached the library, and police announced at a 4:00 p.m. news conference that the killers’ bodies had been found. The Parkland shooting began at 2:21 p.m. EST, but the perpetrator fled the campus and escaped. That is exceptionally rare. He was picked up around 3:40 and then arrested, but there was doubt for some time about whether he was the right man, and the only man. It was three and a half hours before the SWAT team cleared the last classrooms and gave the all clear.
Americans respond to most mass shootings with shock and grief. Columbine and Parkland provoked fear. Hours of fear. Human responses to those emotions are dramatically different. Fear floods the brain with norepinephrine, a hormonal cousin of adrenaline, which appears to be a primary culprit in the genesis of PTSD. “The outpouring from the adrenal gland and the related chemicals already in pathways in the brain appear to be implicated in the creation of trauma memory,” said Dr. Frank Ochberg, a trauma expert.
A confession. Just three months before Parkland, one of the worst shootings ever—(can we stop awarding them titles?)—tore apart the town of Sutherland Springs, Texas, and I turned away. Twenty-six people were killed in a church, which made it worse, but when a friend relayed the info from the back seat of a car, I asked how bad it was, said “That’s horrible,” and changed the subject. Much of the country had begun to do the same.
Journalists were sensing the malaise or feeling it themselves, and had been scaling back coverage. The Trace, a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom that reports on gun violence in America, analyzed news coverage of Parkland against the seven deadliest shootings in the prior five years. The Pulse shooting in 2016 seems to have been the point when millions of Americans decided they couldn’t bear it anymore. Nothing ever changed, except the body count, which kept rising. The Onion famously reruns the same headline after every time: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
Hope for gun reform swelled after Columbine, but even the Colorado legislature failed. Guns laws actually grew much looser when the federal assault weapons ban expired five years later. Virginia Tech brought another push, which didn’t quite get there—but momentum seemed to be building.