Another college massacre followed by a shopping center massacre followed by a college massacre followed by a Wendy's massacre and it will be just a matter of days or weeks or months before the pattern is repeated. And the calls continue for the government to do something. My question? What can the government do?

Our government is struggling to do the things they are supposed to be doing. The present administration is on the way out. The Congress is in disarray. The military is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. The IRS is getting ready for its annual assault on our pocketbooks. The Justice Department is still trying to wiggle out of the conflict with Congress caused by its failure to state at the very beginning of the firing of the federal attorneys that they served at the discretion of the president — period!

So who or what government agency is supposed to arm itself and patrol the country on the lookout for people with mayhem on their minds? Bulletin! The federal government was founded to keep the peace and protect the nation from outside enemies, not from enemies from within. Bulletin! The best defense, as a sports writer of the past once postulated, is a good offense. The best defense against a gun is a gun! One armed professor at Virginia Tech would have saved many lives. Sounds radical but we are in a crisis because of loose laws on gun ownership, and the easy availability of all kinds of guns and ammunition.

It is time that post offices, fast food restaurants, high schools and colleges and universities train workers, administrators, teachers and security personnel in the use of handguns and let the public know that no longer are there places where you can pick off people like sheep in a pasture. Start shooting and you can expect someone to start returning fire. That knowledge alone would be a serious deterrent.

This may sound radical, but the problem is not going away by passing laws or restricting the manufacture or sale of guns. There are already enough guns in both the legal and illegal marketplace to arm the kooks who are convinced that the way to die is to kill as many people as you can before you take your own life. Even if this copycat trend continues for the next 100 years, the legal and illegal supply of guns is probably more than adequate.

I hate to keep beating the same drum, but evil is a reality and we are feeding the evil among us with music, movies, TV and the ever-expanding world of pornography. Without the stabilizing influence of faith in the one true God, people are spinning out of control. Like the Egyptian royalty of the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings, people bent on taking their own lives seem to want as many people as possible to accompany them on that final journey. It may seem callous, but I for one think it is time we made it easy for those bent on suicide by massacre. End their life for them before they have a chance to take someone else's. Or, better still, maybe a computer genius can come up with a virtual computer program that will enable those bent on mass killings to do so in cyber space and let the rest of us go on living.

Robert F. McGlew is a semi-retired minister who now enjoys condo living in Amesbury with his wife, Margery.

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