I am not afraid of much, but Osama bin Laden scares me, at least in the abstract. I don’t toss and turn all night obsessing over bin Laden or worry that I’m going to look across the aisle on my next flight and discover he has a window seat, but the level of patience and years of planning behind the Sept. 11, 2001, jihad attacks frighten me more than almost anything I can think of – unless it’s the terrorism we Americans have demonstrated we are capable of exacting on one another.

If Charles Carl Roberts IV, who killed five West Nickel Mines Amish School students and injured five others earlier this month, didn’t perpetuate an act of chilling, blood-curdling terrorism, the word has lost its meaning in today’s geopolitical application. We shouldn’t be so specific about terrorism and think of it only in terms of foreign nationals drinking the Kool-Aid and flying airplanes into skyscrapers.

To simply call the violence that occurred in rural Pennsylvania on Oct. 2 a “school shooting” isn’t strong enough to describe what happened. Since the rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado left 15 people dead in 1999, we’ve become a little numb to it. Roberts ratcheted it up a notch by attacking some of the most innocent among us.

What must the rest of the world think of the United States when even students in a secluded Amish school aren’t safe? That it rings hollow for this country to declare itself the moral authority for the world?

The fact is, we’re killing each other at a higher rate than U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq. We’re killing each other off at a rate of about 42 people a day, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. In Iowa alone last weekend, nine people were murdered in three separate incidents, including five members of a prominent family in Southeast Iowa, where everything looked pastoral from the outside. No one really knows what goes on in so-called good families.

According to the Brady Campaign, which lobbies for stricter gun-control legislation, there were about 192 million privately owned firearms in the United States in 2005. There were 339,200 firearm-related crimes, including 11,300 murders, recorded in the United States in 2004, according to the U.S. Justice Department. The gun-rights lobby, of course, has the temerity to argue that those statistics illustrate its point that the right to bear arms is a basic security issue, never looking at the ridiculous incongruity of the argument. Presumably, those Amish schoolchildren would have been OK had they been packing Colt .45s.

As a society, we’re young, impudent and, frankly, such an emotional mess that it’s rarely our first instinct to try to understand the causes of violence. Rather, we too often answer it in kind, relying on the faulty reasoning that we’ll somehow prevail with that attitude. It didn’t work on the playground and it doesn’t work in real life.

It’s a fine way for the moral authority of the world to act.

We’d better get to work on our own rehabilitation quickly, or macabre laughter at our expense is the best we can expect from the rest of the world. A good benchmark as we seek to address problems in non-violent ways was provided to us very poignantly by the Amish families whose children were murdered.

They didn’t react as much as they responded. They won’t be exacting revenge or inflicting a bigger hurt than the one delivered to them. They moved from grief to forgiveness in a single step. There’s a valuable lesson in that.

Who’s the real bogeyman? I’m not sure. But more and more, I think it is us.