He killed four of his classmates and wounded seven others. 15 years old is old enough to know how terrible the impact of his actions would be. There is certainly more that we as a society could have done to help him with his mental illness, but that does not erase his agency and make him not responsible for his crimes. He has more than earned his punishment.
The more bits per cell you store, the more dense and therefore cheaper your flash chips can be for a give capacity. The downside is that it is slower and less reliable since you have to be able to write and read exponentially more voltage states per cell, e.g. 2 states for SLC, 4 states for MLC, 8 states for TLC, etc.