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The next generation is already listening.

Nine-year-old Matheo Richman of Tucson waited patiently after Cullen’s talk, while the author was interviewed live on C-SPAN Book TV to a national audience from the prestigious festival on the University of Arizona campus.

Then Matheo got his attention to tell him Emma and David and all the other Parkland teens are his heroes.

“Oh, cool!” Cullen responded, and asked to take a selfie with him to show Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg and the rest.

Matheo lost a cousin in the Sandy Hook school shooting, he explained.

Avielle Richman.

She was 6.

Sandy Hook, the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Connecticut — “that’s the one everyone thought was going to change things,” Cullen had noted in his talk earlier Sunday afternoon, “because it’s 6-year-olds, c’mon!”

But it’s not the level of horror or outrage that begins a movement toward change, said Cullen.

By the time the Parkland high school shooting came around on Valentine’s Day last year, there was pent-up anger — “the candle was there to be lit.”

“The No. 1 thing is the messenger,” he said. “It had to be the kids. And those Sandy Hook kids were too young to speak for themselves.”

“The Parkland kids changed the game by being the messengers themselves.”

“Healing me ... healing America”

Emotion overcame Cullen quickly and suddenly as he spoke at UA’s Gallagher Theater in one of the closing sessions of this weekend’s 11th annual Tucson festival, the third-largest such book event in the country.

He had opened by acknowledging Tucson’s mass shooting of Jan. 8, 2011.

“I am sorry you have to be one of the communities hit by this, that you are on the list that keeps growing ridiculously longer. Now when we say Aurora, we have to say which one,” he said, incredulous. “There are so goddamned many of these.”

Two decades ago, Cullen, a journalist, was among the first to arrive on the scene at Columbine High, as the carnage there launched the modern era of school lockdowns and terror. He wrote a definitive account in the New York Times bestseller “Columbine,” and became a nationally known expert on school shootings.

And then, a bout of secondary PTSD “knocked me down,” followed by a “daunting and terrifying” relapse.

“The killers don’t get inside me,” he said. “I thought that would be the darkest part of writing the book. For me, it’s the survivors, and just getting to know them.”

He swore he would never plunge back into the aftermath. But by noon the day after the Parkland shooting, after Hogg’s activism had already begun on TV news and in social media, Cullen was writing a piece for Politico: Is this time really different?

So he went, and when he arrived at the park in Florida where memorials were sprouting, he saw 17 angels, lit up, representing the students who died.

“My legs actually gave out, and I was kneeling on the ground, sobbing, instantly,” Cullen told the Tucson audience, his eyes suddenly red and teary, his words catching in his throat. “I sobbed it out for 10 minutes.”

“But then, meeting and talking with these kids — they healed me.

“I feel like the kids are healing America. And taking us somewhere.”

“Not about a shooting; about a way out”

“Here is a sentence you would not expect in a review of a book on one of the country’s most notorious school shootings: ‘Parkland’ by Dave Cullen is one of the most uplifting books you will read all year,” the Washington Post wrote.

“I didn’t do a book about a shooting,” Cullen said. “I did a book about a reaction to a shooting, and a possible way out.

“And I am hopeful.”

His book takes readers inside the family homes — it was usually the living room of Cameron Kasky, “the bubbliest person on earth” — where these talented suburban teens pooled their strengths, drawn from their theater, campus journalism or student government backgrounds, and strategized their uprising.

They had urgency and they are brilliant at speaking to their generation through social media. They made lots of wise, firm decisions early on — to be bipartisan because “if it’s just a red-blue thing, we’re screwed.” To give everyone in the group equal voice and veto power. To emphasize that some of their own parents were law enforcement officers and gun owners and that they aren’t against the Second Amendment. To reach out to, train with and merge with urban students of color who faced daily gun violence in Chicago and other cities.

They also “spent a lot of time with Gabby and Mark,” meaning Tucson mass shooting survivor Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly.

Hogg is “the angry young man” who began filming his fellow students and documenting the shooting’s immediate aftermath while they were still in lockdown, because if he was going to die, he was going to show and shame America, Cullen said — drawing applause from the book festival audience.

Gonzalez is the galvanizing star, a mesmerizing face of the movement.

Behind the scenes, Jackie Corin is the practical, detail-oriented organizer who got the permission slips gathered, etc., so buses of student advocates could roll.

“Jackie is a presence, but with a tiny little voice so she stood on a chair” to be heard, Cullen said. “She’s got it going on, and she became kind of the hero of the book.”

And Matt Deitsch is the political strategist, who helped them decide to take their summer bus tour into “gun country, red states and red districts to engage more people in the conversation,” and to focus on the 2018 midterm elections.

“And they have the vast majority on their side,” Cullen said. In almost all polls on the issue, he said, more than 90 percent of Americans agree on universal background checks for gun sales.

“Gun owners, too,” he added. “They love their children, too, and they’re afraid to send them to kindergarten.”

“The NRA, by playing a bullying game and making gun safety a toxic issue politically, isn’t speaking for their own membership,” Cullen said.

“How do we get the majority of Americans to meet somewhere in the middle,” where their hearts really are, he asked? “Everyone is afraid to take a step toward there, because the NRA won’t give an inch. No one trusts each other even to go a step toward the middle.”

But the Parkland leaders have had “an amazing first year,” he said.

He gives them credit for increasing the percentage of voters under age 30 who turned out in the midterms; for the fact that their side outspent the NRA; for helping to flip the House; and that “for the first time in the exit polling, gun safety made the list.”

He also pointed to Democrat Nancy Pelosi, “who announced on Day 1” after the midterms that her party would bring up gun regulation legislation, “a complete reversal.”

“Her party had been hiding and running on this issue for a generation,” Cullen said, because Republicans and the NRA “would always use it against them.”

“That really tells you everything, that the kids had an impact.

“Gun safety is now an issue that’s a political winner, rather than a loser.”

They did have a lot of sad, “crappy days” along the way, and some breakdowns, “but when they hit the wall, they found a way over it.”

“It wasn’t a magic act. They aren’t Joan of Arc. They’re just normal kids.

“Just go for it,” he advised others who want to keep their movement going.

Matheo Richman is among them.