Jeff Kass covered the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado 10 years ago this month for The now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. He wrote a book released last month, "Columbine: A True Crime Story."

"We are all Columbine," was the expression that emerged 10 years ago into our collective vocabulary. It still rings true -- just change the locale.

In 2007, Virginia Tech saw 33 dead, including the killer, in the nation's deadliest mass shooting. On April 20, 1999, 15 died, including the two killers, in what remains the world's most iconic school shooting: Columbine.

More recently in Carthage, authorities say Robert Stewart killed seven residents and a nurse at a nursing home before being shot and captured.

I still get a pounding in my stomach with news of each successive incident. I also try to note: Does it make the front pages?

The answer remains yes, but not for as long. Columbine consumed the world for weeks. Carthage seems to slip away more quickly. While the incidents remain terrible touchstones, their half-lives appear shorter and shorter.

It seems either way, the media loses. If we don't give the shootings enough attention, we are ignoring a serious social issue and deep emotional loss.

But there is also the question of how the media doles out attention. Victims' families often note, sadly, that we give too much publicity to the killers.

There also appears to be a copycat effect aided and abetted by the media.

But the media did not cause a seemingly unquenchable anger to well up inside the teen killers at Columbine or the 45-year-old Carthage suspect. An opinion piece I once read asked, What episode of "Oprah" was it that drove the Columbine killers over the edge? By extension, which segment of "Nightline" twisted the Carthage painter?

The media are not the problem but part of the solution. If there is a copycat effect, that may be in part because mass killers live in their own delusional world of mutual respect.

Some equate media coverage with glorification. But I argue that sunshine is a disinfectant. The answer is not to shut the door, throw away the key and let potential killers and their admirers fester in the darkened room. Dissecting the lives of mass shooters and applying clinical terms to their psychoses strips away their glory.

My book begins with these lines: "On the day of Columbine, seventeen-year-old Dylan Bennet Klebold is wearing a black T-shirt with 'Wrath' printed in red letters across the chest. The red matches the blood that will later gurgle out of his head."

Glorification?

But the goal is not to scare potential shooters. The media and academics are searching for the fundamental causes of school shootings. We turn the page -- sometimes the front page -- when we come to see mass shootings as just a series of random, inexplicable acts.

If we investigate them, and understand them, we can make sense of them and, we hope, stop them.