When I was in junior high school, there was an algebra teacher whom all of us hated. My friends and I frequently entertained each other with stories about her grisly demise. We even featured her as the villain in a role-playing game in which we obliterated her with a laser cannon.

Yes, this was immature, anti-social behavior, and we were probably being unfair to the woman. But we were typical adolescent boys with typical adolescent boy fantasies: beautiful, naked girls, and our enemies perishing in big, fiery explosions ... in that order.

None of us ever conceived of actually harming our algebra teacher. Granted, none of us ever wrote out our fantasies and turned them in to her as a homework assignment either. But if we had, it might have merited punishment for insolence, but certainly not for "threatening" her.

I suppose a small fraction of teenagers who fantasize or write about killing their teachers or classmates actually do hurt someone. But all this "post-Columbine sensibility" is only teaching kids that if they have any thoughts that anyone might consider the least bit disturbing, they'd better keep them to themselves, lest jittery school administrators and hyperreactive parents decide that they're dangerous and need to be treated as threats to society.

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