Don’t watch. I’m warning you.

A ghastly video went viral this week showing a teenaged girl attacking another near a high school in East Hazelwood, Missouri. In it, the larger girl pins the smaller one and begins to mercilessly pound the girl’s head into the pavement.

It’s so graphic, so disturbing, that once viewed you can’t unsee it.

At the end of the video the attacker gets up and the victim is almost motionless on the ground, just twitching slightly.

As I write this, the 15-year-old victim is in critical condition with massive head injuries. She’s suffering from a fractured skull, frontal lobe damage and a brain bleed.

Her 15-year-old attacker is in custody. No word yet on whether she’ll be charged and tried as an adult.

I agree. This was either malicious wounding or attempted murder. Or straight up murder if the comatose girl doesn’t survive.

This ruthless attacker shouldn’t be back on the streets for decades. If ever.

This burst of rage came just days after another student - a 14-year-old boy - from a nearby junior high was stabbed to death in an after-school brawl.

St. Louis County Police say the act (the stabbing) does not appear to be random.

“We noticed that when kids are unsupervised, they are more subject to get into altercations; that’s what we see, what I’ve seen, in my own neighborhood,” Eric Burnette, neighbor, said. “Once they leave school, that’s when the kids get into their altercations.”

Look, after-school fistfights have been around forever. Usually between boys. Typically, they’re broken up by a teacher or bystander and injuries are not that serious.

But these were something different. These were vicious attacks.

And they’re happening around the country.

There could be many factors at work: parental neglect, too much screen time, gang activity, violent video games, a lack of moral grounding.

Some experts are beginning to draw parallels between anti-social behavior and the covid lockdowns.

Fortune magazine published an alarming piece in September headlined “School Kids Are So Violent Coming Out Of The Pandemic That They’re Sending Teachers To The Hospital But An Expert Says To Resist ‘Get Tough’ Approaches.”

The article claims that after decades of declining rates of violence among students, that trend dramatically reversed once the lockdowns ended and kids returned to school.

(We saw that in Newport News last year when a 6-year-old boy shot and almost killed his teacher.)

According to Fortune, “The National Center for Education Statistics found that 84% of public school leaders felt the pandemic negatively affected student behavior. Another survey found two out of three teachers and leaders perceived more student misbehavior in 2021 than in 2019.”

This week marks the 4th anniversary of the official start of the pandemic lockdowns. I remember walking out of the Virginia Beach mayor’s “State of the City” address (the 2024 speech was yesterday) and experiencing shock as my phone blow up with news that the governor was ordering schools to close.

It seemed unthinkable. We already knew that kids didn’t seem to be suffering from the virus as severely as adults.

Some of us protested school closures immediately. Others, especially the teachers’ unions, supported the lockdowns and tried to keep schools closed for as long as two years.

What happened to many children when they no longer went to school? They became socially isolated, friendless and spent endless hours playing violent video games. That was never going to turn out well.

Looks like we may be paying dearly for the idiotic, impulsive actions of government in 2020 for many years to come.