The following is the text of 180 Seconds with Craig Ranapia from Saturday April 21. You can read more of Craig's commentary on his recently-revived blog.

The murder of thirty three students and faculty members at Virginia Tech this week inevitably raised this question: Could it have been avoided?

Unfortunately, a headline in the usually sober Washington Post implied entirely the wrong answer:

**STUDENT WROTE ABOUT DEATH AND SPOKE IN WHISPERS, BUT NO ONE IMAGINED WHAT CHO SEUNG-HUI WOULD DO**

Why would anyone? Twenty-twenty hindsight is a perfectly human — and perfectly useless — response to adversity.

No educator should imagine that reserve, shyness or good old-fashioned emo sulking is a pathological trait.

And how much should you read into Cho’s much-reported morbidly violent creative writing exercises? Well, let’s consider what another English major once cooked up in another idyllic college town: Orono, home of the University of Maine.

In 1967, this freshman wrote a novel with an all-too topical premise: A high school student is reluctantly re-admitted after attacking a teacher with a wrench. When a counselling session goes horribly wrong, he sets fire to his locker, shoots two teachers, and holds his classmates hostage. Over a long, hot day he forces them to ‘share’ at gunpoint while rambling at length about his uncontrollable ‘rage’.

The ravings of a freaking psycho who’s rotting in a locked ward as we speak? Not quite — welcome to the first novel of Stephen Edwin King, B.A. (Class of ’71), successful purveyor of the twisted and disturbing for over thirty years.

King allowed Rage to go out of print in the United States following the Columbine shooting, but its not hard to find if you’re so inclined.

While King has often been accused of doing decadent and depraved things to the Western Civilization, he hasn’t killed anyone.

What should have run every bell in town, if recent media reports are accurate, is that Cho was stalking at least two women – and charges weren’t pressed. But bad snuff fiction in a creative writing class? I’m not so sure it should have attracted any more attention than a very bad grade.

My university days — for better and worse — were full of the mad, bad and dangerous to know. As well as nuts, sluts, freaks, geeks and drama queens of all genders and sexual orientations.

Most of us just grew up; and none of the remainder became mass murderers no matter how ‘weird’ and ‘dark’ they got.

Stalkers have no place on a university campus, or anywhere else. I just hope one tragedy doesn’t result in the sad, lonely, socially inept and depressed being forced into compulsory counselling because they’re bad writers or don’t fit some surreal standard of ‘emotional correctness’.

Growing up is hard enough.

SPECIAL FEATURES

But before I get too down on Stephen King, I’d recommend reading his keynote address to the 1999 Vermont Library Conference on ” something very serious indeed: adolescent violence in American schools”, how it connects with his own work among much else.

A three minute radio slot doesn’t give you any time to consider the question: But does profiling actually work? One place to start is the discussions on the subject here, and another thoughtful if depressing roundtable on how “safe” you can realistically keep a campus the size of a small town. They were originally broadcast last week on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, which screens at 10pm, Tuesday – Saturday, Triangle TV in Wellington or Auckland.)