Once again, kids are killing kids. At a time and place where what ought to matter is getting into college, going to the prom, winning the big game, learning to drive, falling in love for the very first time, the talk this week is of disarming bombs, healing wounds, and burying children. What the hell is going on?

I don't know. Nobody knows. And if anyone tells you they know, they are wrong.

I was born in 1953, a year that probably saw no school shootings, but certainly saw more than its share of racial-motivated murders that never made the news. If there was an Eisenhower glow that somehow protected the schools, it didn't protect everyone. Just 30 years earlier, my mother was a little girl who awakened to find a cross burning in her front yard in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. Her father was the local newspaper editor and a liberal. Soon they moved to another town.

Hate knows no season.

Perhaps these things go in cycles. New York City in 1850 — a supposedly genteel Victorian time when the Big Apple was a lot smaller — had as many murders as the city has today. We have always been a violent society.

Why it suddenly seems that school is the place to kill your enemies, then blow your own brains out, beats me. We can (and do) blame single-parent homes, two-earner homes, drugs, the death of family values, violence in the media — you name it. And now we blame the Internet.

Eric Harris, one of the two gun boys in Littleton, Colorado, had a Web page on America Online. On this page, he wrote a kind of diary of experiences and dreams in which he described exactly who he intended to kill (there was a list, constantly being revised), why he wanted to kill these people and how he planned to do it.

In our litigious, liability-crazed society, AOL is now under fire for not finding and shutting-down Eric Harris's Web page. Well-intentioned but incredibly misguided people seem to think that silencing expression will make this problem go away.

The truth is exactly the opposite. AOL should be commended for allowing Eric Harris his page of hate. The page's existence probably saved lives and could have saved many more.

Each new communication medium acts to open society further, though at a cost. The Post Office literally enabled a national government to communicate with its citizens. The telegraph made big business possible. The telephone allowed our families to remain in touch just as it enabled them to disperse and stop seeing each other.

Eric Harris probably did more plotting on the telephone than he ever did on the Internet, yet nobody is blaming the phone company. Why blame the Internet and not the phone company? Because the Internet is new. Nobody in Littleton, Colorado, remembers a time without telephones, but almost everyone remembers a time without Web surfing and e-mail. Kill the Net.

Then there is the intrusive nature of e-mail and the exhibitionist quality of the Web. Millions of kids have web pages. Instead of hiding their diaries under their pillows, these kids are welcoming the rest of us into their lives. To some this is unseemly, but I think it is good. These kids, so isolated by our '90s TV culture, are seeking connection. Connection is always good.

But didn't Eric Harris learn to make pipe bombs on the Web? Didn't he buy his guns online? Probably not. If you can spell "pipe bomb," you know enough to build one. And the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is doing a pretty good job of keeping eBay from being filled with Uzis for sale.

The threat isn't what people think it is. Remember a few years ago, when the controversy was over how easy it was to find instructions on the Internet for building atomic bombs? Where are all those A-bombs today? It seems eBay is fresh out of plutonium.

Remember flame mail? Verbally abusive, poorly socialized jerks used the anonymous nature of the Net to almost destroy the newsgroups. Yet the newsgroups survive, having generally evolved a way to police themselves. Of course, now they risk being killed by spam, a form of commercial abuse.

The Internet has an ability to level society, which is why those near the top of society don't like it. Denial is a popular state of mind in America, and the Internet undermines denial.

So Eric Harris had a Web page, and on this page he told the names of the people he wanted to kill, and why, and how he planned to kill them. People in Littleton knew about this Web page and told the police. The police, citing Eric's First Amendment right to free speech, said there was nothing they could do about it.

This is what amazes me most, that the police thought they were being asked to shut down a Web page when the alarm was being raised by a mother who found her son's name on Eric Harris's death list. She wasn't asking for the death list not to be published. She just didn't want her son to be killed. She wanted the community to protect itself against a self-described mass murderer.

There are more Eric Harris' in more places like Littleton. Their Web pages absorb emotional energy that might instead go into killing people. These cries for help can be easily found with a search engine and a peer counselor. In this sense, the Internet is part of the solution, not the problem. Why would we ever want to shut these pages down?

The ultimate solution is to solve these problems in person, and that's a place where the Net probably does let us down. The Littleton teenager whose mother took Eric Harris's Web page to the police probably escaped death by making his own peace in person with the boy who had wanted to kill him.

"I like you now," said Eric Harris a few minutes before opening fire. "Be careful."