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In 1981, a rotten nobody shot President Ronald Reagan to impress a girl.

Also seriously wounded in the shooting were White House press secretary James Brady, DC police officer Thomas Delehanty, and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy.

Suddenly, all of America knew the rotten nobody’s name. His life story was told and retold on the evening news. His picture was on television, and in every newspaper and news magazine.

Only a few months before that, a different rotten nobody had murdered John Lennon outside his home in New York because the nobody wanted to be famous. He got his wish — even now, it seems Barbara Walters interviews him in prison whenever she needs to fill out another hour of infotainment. He’s her “go to” guy.

I made a resolution back then: insofar as possible, I would never mention the name of those rotten nobodies, or of any other rotten nobody who hurt or killed people to become famous.

It costs me points in Trivial Pursuit games. That’s a price I’m willing to pay.

But it’s lonely. Every time there’s a shooting in a school, you can bet every television network will remind us of the long history of earlier school shootings, and they’ll show us the faces and tell us the names of the rotten nobodies who murdered students and a teacher at Columbine High School in 1999. Still famous after all these years.

The rotten nobody who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday paused between atrocities to mail off a press kit to NBC News in New York. What a surprise.

NBC received the package on Wednesday, and showed some of the photos and video during their nightly newscast. What a surprise.

They justified the decision to show the videos with high-minded words about the public’s right to know what caused the murders.

On MSNBC, they aired the photos and the videos non-stop. During Keith Olbermann’s one-hour MSNBC program, the videos and photos played over and over on a loop on screen even during talking-head interviews. The replays paused only during a very brief segment about some of the victims. (Now, that’s respect.)

Funny, I still don’t understand what caused the murders.

Last night I checked the websites of CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC. Every single one of them featured a photo from the rotten nobody’s press kit. What a surprise.

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