At the risk of jumping in with the media frenzy surrounding the situation at VT, I just wanted to quote a part of the story that terribly saddens me.
From Yahoo News:

Classmates in Virginia, where Cho grew up, said he was teased and picked on, apparently because of shyness and his strange, mumbly way of speaking.

Once, in English class at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., when the teacher had the students read aloud, Cho looked down when it was his turn, said Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior and high school classmate. After the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho began reading in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.

“The whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,'” Davids said.

Stephanie Roberts, 22, a classmate of Cho’s at Westfield High, said she never witnessed anyone picking on Cho in high school. But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with him told her they recalled him getting bullied there.

“There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him,” Roberts said. “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.”

…

A 2002 federal study on common characteristics of school shooters found that 71 percent of them “felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack.”

The report said that “in some of these cases the experience of being bullied seemed to have a significant impact on the attacker and appeared to have been a factor in his decision to mount an attack at the school. In one case, most of the attacker’s schoolmates described the attacker as the kid everyone teased.”

When will we learn that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is a lie? When will we learn that teasing and bullying is as terrible as murder. And before you think I’m making an erroneous stretch of a claim, it wasn’t my original thought.

I long for the day that adults and kids seeing teasing as disturbing as a school shooting. That it becomes something so wrong and inappropriate that schools call off classes to debrief, parent’s leave work to comfort the victims and correct the perpetrators.

I don’t mean in any way to diminish the mourning and heart ache of those involved in the situation at VT, I just think we need to expand those feelings and our attention beyond incidents were people are killed, and move to addressing as well were words, teasing, hatred, and bullying have killed people inside. Where is the love?