And Then Along Came Eric Harris And Dylan Klebold

Journalism Prof Stephen Kimber laments the treatment of Brendan Jones, a grade 12 student at Heart Lake Secondary School in Brampton, Ont.

Jones wrote an essay as part of his final exam for his creative-writing class. The five-page, handwritten essay was titled Schools (sic) Out.

His equally unnamed protagonist is a 16-year-old girl who, at the end of the story, traps her science teacher in the basement of her house, picks up a baseball bat and says, "Sorry, Mr. Adams, but schools (sic) out."

Brendan did not get into serious trouble for mixing up his plurals and his possessives, or even - as his teacher was careful to note in her teacherly way in the margins - for using cliches and violating the inviolate "show-don't-tell" rule of composition.

No, Brendan's real crime, as it turned out, wasn't literary. It was that he'd chosen "inappropriate subject matter."

Sure its too bad that Mr. Jones suffered through a visit from the local police for nothing more than the crime of writing bad fiction. Sure the odds are that he's a fine kid working out a bit of teenage angst through creative writing.

But the world changed when the two above-named kids walked into Columbine High School and murdered a dozen or so of their classmates, and it was later discovered that the massacre had been prefigured in some of their high-school creative writing projects.

Similarly, Seung-Hui Cho's propensity to violence was apparent from his writing projects a year before 2007's Virginia Tech Massacre. If the school had acted on these signals, who knows what might have turned out differently?

Given events such as these, the people at Heart Lake Secondary School would have been crazy to act in any manner other than the way they did. You don't play around with this kind of stuff anymore.

The Unluckiest Serial Killer In The Whole Wide World

The Virginia Tech shootings brought back memories of Joseph Ferguson, whose rampage in Sacramento resembled Cho Seung-Hui's in that Ferguson also prepared a video-tape for the local media explaining the reasons behind his actions.

From The Mass Murderer's Hit List (with minor rewrites):

According to Authorities, the 20-year old Ferguson began killing people because he was despondent over getting suspended from his supervisor's job at Burns Security in Sacramento a week earlier. Burns officials said Ferguson was suspended after his ex-girlfriend, fellow security guard Nina Susu, said he vandalized her car after their breakup. The officials also notified the FBI that Ferguson might be dangerous because he made threats after the suspension. An FBI check revealed Ferguson had no history of violence and nothing was done.

Susu and and Marsha Jackson, a 32-year-old single mother of three, were the first to die. They were shot as they worked at a city maintenance yard. Then Ferguson headed to a city-run marina where he shot and killed 48-year-old George Bernardino, another Burns employee, and 19-year-old John Glimstad, who just started working for the marina. All four victims were unarmed and riddled with gunshot wounds. Police found AK-47 rounds, shotgun rounds and 9 mm handgun shells at the crime scenes. Police found a handgun at the first shooting scene and recovered an assault weapon at the marina.

Ferguson then headed to the Sacramento Zoo where he handcuffed another former co-worker to a tree and fled in her car. Police Chief Arturo Venegas Jr. said the woman was spared because "he thought she was just a nice person."

Police searched the south Sacramento house where Ferguson had been living with his father and brother and found a cache of weapons, including two shotguns, two assault rifles, two revolvers, a ballistic helmet, a flak jacket and a gas mask. They also discovered an undisclosed assortment of white supremacist paraphernalia.

As Sacramento authorities frantically searched for rampaging killer Joseph Ferguson, police and Burns officials evacuated employees from their homes and escorted them to safe houses. However Ferguson did appear in the home of a Burns supervisor who had not been evacuated where he filmed a video suicide note before killing the supervisor and stealing his car. In the video, Ferguson said he would soon kill himself. "I've taken four victims, this should be good enough to last about a week on the news. It's time to feed the news media."

After disappearing all day, Ferguson was spotted by a highway patrolman at 11:30 p.m., triggering a 40-minute high-speed chase through suburban Sacramento. Ferguson fired more than 200 rounds at the pursuing officers before smashing his car into a light pole. The lovestruck killer then committed suicide inside the stolen car. In the video Ferguson bragged about putting on "a hell of a show," adding, unambiguously, "I giveth and I taketh away, that's how it goes in fucking life."

There are a couple of things to note here. The most important and obvious is Ferguson's media consciousness. He considered his rampage a made-for-tv event, one that even came with a moral (that's how it goes in fucking life). The second is his estimation of the staying power of this kind of performance--about a week, until people were sated and ready to move on to the next atrocity. By the same reasoning, we should see the Virginia Tech killings drop out of the news in the next couple of days.

But why, you ask, have I never heard of Joseph Ferguson? Well, one reason, crass though it is, has to do with Body Count. When watching the news becomes entertainment, and when mass murder becomes just another blood sport on the tele, five victims is simply not all that impressive a total. But the most important thing is that Mr. Ferguson launched his rampage on September 9th 2001, and died early on the 10th. His video landed up on the desk of the MSM on September 11th, 2001, when they had other things on their minds, and what coverage he got was limited to postage stamp sized stories relegated to the back pages on the morning of September 12th (where I read his comment about "feeding the media" and thought: how ironic).

The guy didn't get one day, let alone his week, of infamy.