rest of their lives—to see sensible gun laws in this country and so that kids don’t have to fear going back to school. Thank you.”
6
Jackie continued fielding problems and herding strays. She conferred with Book in her office, and savored a few minutes of downtime, playing with Book’s one-year-old twins in their drool-soaked douglas strong T-shirts. The babies briefly defused the pressure and reminded Jackie whom they were fighting for. Would those babies still fear gunmen in their high school? The Columbine students were old enough to be Jackie’s parents. They had never thought to fear for their own kids. We knew better now.
Jackie looked exhausted. Was all this good for her own recovery?
The angry cloud hovered through most of the afternoon. “I’m extremely, extremely angry and sad,” Alfonso Calderon said. “I don’t know if I’m going to have faith in my state and local government anymore, because what I saw today was discouraging.”
But shortly after five, the first group cycled out of their meeting with Governor Scott, and many of them left his office beaming. None of them wanted to talk right off, because dinner had arrived and they were ravenous for their box meals. Once they had eaten, many described the governor as listening, responding, and asking probing questions. “I feel like he really heard us,” sophomore Tanzil Philip said. “I sat right next to him and he was writing down everything we were talking about and he put checkmarks next to the things that were really important to us.” That sure contrasted with the legislators, he said.
There were many dissenters. Daniel Duff complained that Scott never even uttered the words “gun control.” Still, all the students seemed glad they came. “Oh, a hundred percent,” Daniel said. He looked forward to organizing the Washington march, but also considered attending a local one. “I haven’t talked to my parents about that,” he said.
They boarded the buses spent, and arrived home around four a.m. A car was already waiting in front of Jackie’s house. After a quick snooze, it whisked Jackie and her mom to the airport for their flight to Los Angeles to tape Ellen.
7
On Friday, Governor Scott defied the NRA and proposed a modest gun bill. Two weeks later, he signed a variation of it into law. It banned bump stocks, raised the minimum age for buying a gun to twenty-one, and added a three-day waiting period for most long gun purchases. It did not address assault weapons.
The kids had discussed those ideas throughout the trip, and most of them derided them as minor no-brainers. The country would still be awash in guns; a tiny fraction of attackers would just have to work a little harder to get a certain deadly type. “Some people know the baloney that politicians feed us,” Jackie said. But she saw a marathon. The gun safety team had lost ground relentlessly, year after year, state after her state—nothing but losses, her entire life. And a prominent Second Amendment warrior had just broken, publicly, with the NRA. No one had seen that coming. Finally, the momentum had flipped to them. Jackie Corin gave her movement something it desperately needed. She gave it a win.
5
Spring Awakening
1
Cameron Kasky was always different—different from everyone, but different from his brothers from the start. The Kaskys had three kids, all boys, two and a half years apart. Cameron was the middle child, but the dynamics changed when his little brother, Holden, began to show signs of autism. “It’s not like it made Cam the youngest, but it’s almost like his childhood was kind of rushed because his brother’s needs took over,” his mother, Natalie, said. But Cameron never hurt for attention. When Cameron was a young boy, they went on a Norwegian Sky family cruise. “Jeff and I walked into one of the adult nightclubs, and [Cameron] was performing. He had left the kids’ camp—I don’t know how, because you’re not supposed to; maybe his leaving was how the cruise lines eventually changed their policies. Jeff and I walk in, and he’s up there making all these off-color jokes. The entire audience is hysterical.”
They were howling. You can watch it on YouTube—Jeff posted it before the shooting. It’s “Jokers Wild” open-mic night, and the room has an industrial Vegas prom decor: exposed beams, corrugated metal ceiling tiles, lights reflecting every foot or two off its gleaming polyurethane wood floor. In the middle of it, a microphone stand, lowered to minimum height, is aligned with Cam’s wisecracking mouth. His dress