What It’s Like to Go Back to School After a Shooting

The ways in which schools and students think about the possibility of mass violence on campus changed a lot between the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School and the 2018 one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Dave Cullen’s last book, 2009’s acclaimed nonfiction work , chronicled the public and private lives of high-school students who survived the 1999 Columbine massacre as they grappled with the question of why this unthinkable horror had happened at their school. —about the activism of the survivors of the February 14, 2018, attack that killed 17 students in Parkland, Florida—follows a group of students determined to not let the world forget that this horror had happened at their school. Why wouldn’t it have? It was happening everywhere else. These students, unlike those