KEY POINTS:
When the next college shooting happens, and it's inevitable there'll be another, the media will have blood on their hands.
The constant replaying of the killer's videoed diatribe has turned Western television into a more sophisticated version of YouTube and every sad, sick soul out there with a grudge against the world will be looking at the coverage the killer is getting and thinking, yeah!
I will never call the killer by name. I've always been appalled I can remember the names of infamous murderers, but seldom the names of their victims. And I really don't care to hear the justifications and grandiose delusions of the Virginia Tech killer.
He's gone, and he's taken 32 souls with him.
If there is anything to be learned from the wreckage, whether the mental health system could have worked better, whether the university should have responded more quickly, then report on that.
But giving the killer the attention he didn't get in this world and so desperately craved is just begging for trouble.
And we should not be complacent in this country. As the number of young offenders grows, and the crimes they commit become more serious, we need to ensure our reporting systems are working well.
Is there another world more feral and savage than the underworld of teenagers? Like animals, teenage packs will mark out anyone different and either isolate or destroy them. If anyone transgresses against their own kind, vengeance is swift and terrible.
Look at the case of the kid who was beaten and humiliated by a pack of teenagers in Hastings. The attack had been planned for a number of days, most of the school knew about it, and 30 kids stood around watching and filming it.
According to the perpetrators, it was payback because the victim had picked on a younger student. Really? Or are they just trying to cover their cruel and sadistic arses? These kids know all about delivering rough justice.
And it was only a couple of years ago that a group of Hawke's Bay boys violated another young man with a broomstick smeared with a burning ointment. What sort of sick individual gets their kicks out of that? The Lord of the Flies is alive and well and living among us. Writer Jodi Picoult has produced a brilliant and uncannily timely novel Nineteen Minutes, that attempts to answer the question of why a young person would pick up a rifle and kill as many of his peers as he possibly can.
She makes no apologies for the shooter, but most readers would feel some sympathy for the gawky, different kid who's relentlessly and mercilessly tormented by his own kind from the first day of school. And what was horrifying in that story is that a family's love sometimes simply isn't enough to save a child.
Some talkback callers say it's an absence of discipline that's resulted in kids going wild. But the bullies and the sadists have always been among us. Tom Brown's School Days and the Lord of the Flies may have been works of fiction but their stories have resonated with generations of kids over the years, precisely because nothing's changed.
Most young people who have endured hell at school got through it. They didn't hurt themselves or others, but the scars remain. For some, it's a permanent stutter, others, a mild form of social phobia, still more carry a burning resentment against their tormentors that they will carry with them to the graves.
I had a lovely lady in her eighties phone me this week, and the rage in her voice when she described the bullying she endured as an 11-year-old was real and raw. There's not much you can do to prevent an ill person picking up a gun and carrying out a shooting. But schools need to have an bullying policy in place that the kids themselves can see is effective. That might give hope to the tormented and make the bullies think twice before they begin their campaigns of terror. We haven't had a kid go on a rampage in this country - let's make sure we do all we can to ensure we never do.
