Perpetrators <> Victims

I was listening to a BBC Documentary podcast a few days ago and heard something which pissed me off big time. It's not the first time I'd heard it, but coming from a major media outlet made it that much worse. The segment was coving the Virginia Tech shootings, interviewing students and faculty who had been through the terrible event. Between the interviews the narrator said we must think of Cho (the gunman) as a victim, just as we think of his victims.
I have a real problem when our society treats offenders as victims. A person with mental issues, such as this case, can be considered a victim, but only up until he pulls the trigger on his classmates. At the point he commits a violent crime he completely stops being a victim and becomes a perpetrator/criminal/monster. I'm sure we've all heard this kind of talk, but it really bothers me. We can force a kid like Cho to get help, or we can continue to treat the "Chos" of the world in a half-hearted manner as we actually did, but when things go terribly wrong we can't look back as if he isn't a monstrous killer. It simply makes me sick to see such apologetic/revisionist history, especially when the event has hardly escaped our collective short-term memory.