Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I put off reading this book for a couple of months because I was worried it would be about the shooting itself. Thankfully, it's not, and once I picked it up I flew through it. It's about the survivors of the Parkland shooting and their lives and political action since the shooting. A lot of it is instructive and inspirational to the rest of us and is so important. I think this book is a great companion to March by John Lewis, about the civil rights marches. Action is hard and takes a very long time, but history moves forward if we're all willing to work, and we really all need to get to work.

When I was 22 at my first job in DC, I met a Columbine kid who was working on some political action regarding th shooting at a nonprofit located in the building I worked at. Columbine is now seen as the beginning of the school shootings, and it's been 18 years, and many school children have died, and now I have my own kids in school. My kids regularly practice "active shooter" drills. They did so when they lived in New York, and they do so in Nebraska because nowhere in our country is safe now. It's a horror, and I wish I’d done more starting 18 years ago.

I really do not understand the conservative position in this country, especially regarding assault weapons. These people are opposed to abortion but are comfortable giving everyone the weapons to instantly "abort" hundreds of children and adults? Do they lose sleep worrying about their own children and grandchildren? Some of the Republican congressmen who were personally shot claim that they don't think guns are the problem. This is especially insincere because they refuse to give money to the National Institute of Health to study the problem so that we can all point to what is and isn't specifically the problem. And look, this isn't my first book on the gun problem, I get that the statistics point to a bigger problem with gun-related suicides, urban violence, or gun owners turning the guns on their own family members, but those issues are also important to me. It's not this gun problem versus that gun problem. It's the huge toll of all the gun deaths together. It's hard to imagine where we go from here beyond talking to the younger generation but it's clear that the gun control movement needs our time and our donations.

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