Dave Cullen, Author of “Parkland: Birth of a Movement”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I mean, look, we remember Sandy Hook and when little kids were massacred and there was an outrage and there was, you know, complete and utter heartbreak. And yet, even that didn’t move the dial the way this did. What — in terms of activism. Well, you’ve written about all of this. You started writing after Columbine 20 years ago, plus. What is it — why is this sort of — what’s so different about this one that has made it something you can’t look away from and these kids of move the dial?

DAVE CULLEN: Well, it was a perfect storm of things and part of it is the timing. But the single biggest thing is the messenger. And what we thought, everyone thought after Sandy Hook, that this time it will really change because, you know, six-year-old kids that’s unthinkable. What we didn’t realize at the time was it is not the degree of horror, it can get more and more horrible and that that isn’t enough, it’s the messenger is crucial. And we thought when Barack Obama took this on and, sort of a brilliant politician of our age, he made it the centerpiece of his State of the Union address and everything seemed aligned. No, a politician can’t be the leader on this for a couple of reasons. One, I don’t think we really look to our politicians as our true leaders anymore. But also, we’re so divisive in America now between the red and blue camps. So if a politician takes us on, it immediately puts half the country against him and we’re locked in this battle in the stalemate. So a lot of different reasons. And also the parents of these kids were involved. It had to be the kids themselves. They had to be the most — and when we see that — just one more point on that. When we see these kids, when we see Emma and David and all these kids, we don’t just see people who escaped with their lives. We see the faces of future targets, kids like our sons and daughters, siblings, our own kids who are going to die and are dying if we don’t do something. That has a power that transcends everything else in a way that we underestimate.

AMANPOUR: Yes. And you mentioned Emma and the kids and their speaking and their activism and their public face. We’ll just put a little snippet out here just to remind everybody of a very famous, obviously, Emma Gonzales when she called the adults out on this issue.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

EMMA GONZALEZ, CO-FOUNDER, MARCH FOR OUR LIVES: Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA, telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call B.S.