A local 14-year-old named Dillon Cossey and his alleged Columbine-style threats have provided two days worth of front page news, and the incident has become a national story.

What I am unable to determine is precisely what the threat was. (It seems to have been related second-hand by a friend who said Cossey tried to recruit him, but the exact words of the threat have not been quoted.) By all accounts, there was no ammunition and his mother had only recently bought guns, one of which she is said to have given him. What the law says about parental supervision, I'm not sure, but it appears the mom violated it.

There's a lot of talk about how the kid was bullied in school, and that the parents took him out and homeschooled him.

One look at a picture of the kid (at the Inquirer and here, and it's not hard to imagine that he was bullied, at least teased.

The kid is morbidly obese.

I'm not quite sure how they define bullying (pretty broadly, I think), but there's little question he would have been teased quite a bit when I was a kid. But he wouldn't have gone on a school shooting spree -- despite the fact that guns were more available then than they are now. It wouldn't even have occurred to anyone that this would be a normal response to teasing. In those days, bullied kids fought back. I was the smallest kid in my class, and I had to fight back a few times, but it wouldn't have occurred to me in my wildest dreams to shoot anyone, even though there were guns in my home.

Now, the formula seems to be along the lines of bullying plus guns in the home equals Columbine.

What has changed? The left blames guns (Michael Moore's "culture of violence" nonsense comes to mind), while many on the right say it's taking the Bible out of the schools. I don't think the Bible has much to do with it, because the Bible was already out of the public schools when I was a kid, yet there were no shootings. I think two of the biggest changes are:

-- the huge growth of media culture, which encourages everyone with a grudge to seek his fifteen minutes of fame and glory;

-- a bizarre cult of hypersensitivity to all possible threats, real or imaginary, and in which the slightest criticism is seen as provoking a legitimate grievance and engendering a sense of entitlement to victim status.

A perfect example is this:

DENVER - In an effort to combat the problem of childhood obesity, the Denver Public School District is sending home student health reports to keep parents informed. However, one parent says it should not have been sent home in her daughter's backpack because she read it.

"The part that upset her the most as she started reading it, there it stated that she was overweight and she started to cry saying, 'Mom, that school tells me I'm fat.' So, it was very heart wrenching," said Flaurette Martinez.

Her daughter Isabel was sent home from the Centennial K-8 School on Monday with the health notice. It listed her height, weight and body mass index - a measure of body fat. Underneath the listing it had a marking next to the status "overweight."

"My daughter is big boned," said Martinez.

Isabel's mother does not have a problem with what the schools are trying to do. She says that type of sensitive information should be mailed directly home to parents, because kids are prone to reading letters sent home by the schools.

"If she would have dropped this letter, a student may have found it and may have exposed it to other students," said Martinez. "Anything specific to the child should be mailed. It should not be given to the child."

However, DPS Spokesperson Alex Sanchez says schools do that all the time. Report cards, disciplinary notices and letters from the principal are commonly sent home with students. Sanchez says it is cheaper for the district to send these things home with students instead of by mail.

Martinez says that decision is causing her daughter emotional distress.

I think media culture and hypersensitivity tend to fuel each other, and the result is a latent hysteria constantly lurking in the background, and ready to break out upon the slightest provocation.

Take nooses. When I was a kid, they meant little more than the fact that a boy had learned how to tie them. Personally, I thought they were cool. It's only been in the past decade that I've suddenly been told that they are "hurtful images" like displaying a swastika. (Boys used to doodle swastikas all the time, as most of their dads were World War II veterans. Hammer and sickles were also considered "cool" to doodle when I was a child.)

At the rate things are "progressing," pretty soon the mere hanging of a noose would shut down Grand Central Station. Recently, one caused panic in a post office (and it seemed imitative of an earlier one which caused chaos at Columbia):

NEW YORK (CBS) ― There was a disturbing discovery near Ground Zero in Manhattan Thursday. A noose was found hanging from a lamppost at the Church Street Post Office. This is just the latest message of hate striking the city.

Police said it wasn't clear where or at whom the Church Street noose might have been directed.

"At this point, there was no target that was evident or any motive," U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Al Weissman said Friday morning. He said no postal workers had reported any threats or other problems.

Postal workers in a second floor office at Church Street noticed the noose Thursday afternoon

Building managers removed the noose, which was later turned over to the NYPD's hate crimes unit for investigation, police said.

Speaking to reporters following a ceremony at a police memorial, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly suggested that the noose outside the post office could have been an attempt to imitate the discovery at Columbia, which shocked the Ivy League campus and received extensive news coverage.

"We have to be concerned about a copycat being out there," he said, adding that police had no suspects or motives in either incident.

Meanwhile, detectives at the NYPD Hate Crime task force have 56 hours of surveillance tapes to comb through, trying to catch the person who hung a noose on Professor Madonna Constantine's door at Columbia University.

A colleague, who Constantine is suing for defamation, says she had nothing to do placing this vile symbol of racism at her door.

Naturally, the ability to create mass panic and fuel media attention leads to copycat behavior:

Kelly also said a noose found Thursday outside a lower Manhattan post office could have been the work of a copycat.

"When something happens, we do have to be concerned that others might do it," Kelly said.

Constantine, a professor of psychology and education, remains shaken by the discovery of the hand-tied hangman's noose on her office door Tuesday morning. "It was a symbol of violence," said Constantine's lawyer, Paul Giacomo. "By hanging a noose, you're saying, 'I want to hang this around your neck. I want to execute you.'"

Detectives were conducting DNA tests on the noose and have interviewed several of Constantine's colleagues and students.

"I don't know of any specific act within the last few weeks leading up to this that would lead my client to believe that one or more people would be a suspect," Giacomo said.

Meanwhile, Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D-Brooklyn) said he will introduce legislation to make displaying a noose a felony akin to showcasing a burning cross or a swastika. "I think it is high time that the law recognizes the racial and historic hatred that a noose symbolizes," Lentol said.

Are rational people really as terrified of nooses, flags, and symbols as they're portrayed as being? Does anyone really and truly believe a piece of rope will hurt anyone? People say they are terrorized, and I think where a noose is left as a threat against a particular individual, it ought to be investigated the way any other threat would be. But I have a problem with the idea that any black person who might see a noose left dangling in a public place is "terrorized." This just makes it way too easy for pranksters to cause huge disruptions over something which basically amounts to nothing.

In another interesting wrinkle on hate crimes, a gay man was recently found guilty of hate crimes against another gay man:

October 12, 2007 -- A Brooklyn jury yesterday found that a gay man who lured another homosexual to his death last year in a plot to steal the victim's pot was guilty of a hate crime, despite their shared sexual orientation.

Anthony Fortunato, 21, was convicted of second-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and attempted petit larceny for his role in a scheme that resulted in the death of Michael Sandy.

He was acquitted of murder charges, which would have carried a minimum 25-year sentence.

The jury foreman, who shot Fortunato a regret-filled look when he read the verdict, said outside the courthouse that he felt the hate-crime law was unjustly applied by the district attorney.

"It's absurd," said the foreman, Eric Zaccar, a playwright. "[The hate crime] is a great law when it applies to fat white guys with baseball bats beating up a black man, or gays, or Jews. But when it applies to one gay person seeking out another gay person, it's absurd."

It's too bad they can't make hysteria illegal.