It’s a terrible tragedy that a teacher was strangled to death by a friend-of-a-friend who happened to be a shady necrophiliac sex pervert.

It’s entirely understandable that the victim’s family, in their need to figure out why something so horrible could happen, have seized upon online porn as a scapegoat.

It’s entirely reprehensible that people who should know better, apparently including some MPs (and the editorial line of dreadful tabloid TV news show News at Ten), are backing them up on this and demanding a ban on online porn (admit that a murderer murdered because he was a horrible person? No, that wouldn’t get me on the telly…)

Update – according to Metro (that quality news source), the murderer mentioned in the 1980s that he thought it might be fun to rape, strangle and kill someone. I guess it’s -possible- that he was downloading ASCII porn over a 300bps net connection…

Fortunately, given the nature of the Internet and the sex industry, trying to implement any controls on porn without an international consensus that it was vile (which only really exists when children are involved) would be more or less impossible.

“If you try to control porn, you’ll end up looking like the boy who stuck his finger in a dyke”, etc.