I was watching the most recent episode of "24" when a piece of my past caught up with me.

It would take forever for me to explain every character and even the situation (the show has a moderately complicated plot), but suffice it to say a bad guy was holding a gun to the head of good guy #1. The bad guy gave good guy #2 a choice: Drop your gun, or I shoot good guy #1.

Back when I was in college, I worked at a pizza joint. At various times I opened the place, ran the lunch rush, delivered pizzas to sorority rush (I have never seen 100 pizzas disappear so damn fast in my life), and closed up shop. During my training for becoming a "closer" (a position not unlike that of a baseball pitcher), my manager presented me with a scenario. Five minutes after I let the last waitress leave, I hear a knock on the door (which is glass head-to-toe). I look over and see a guy with a gun to the head of the waitress. The guy wants me to open the door. What do I do?

The right answer (and not the one I gave) is to turn around and call 911. If the guy is going to shoot the waitress, he will do it whether or not I open the door. After all, he's got a gun and the door is made of glass. He could get in very easily without using a hostage. If I let him in the store, it's much more likely that he'll kill me and the waitress. The pizza chain's position (which does make some sense) is that if there must be dead employees, the fewer the better. The lesson I actually learned was never try to guess what a crazy person will do.

The writers for "24" got this right. Good guy #1 (the hostage) kept yelling "Don't do it" (don't drop his gun) at good guy #2. Good guy #2 (the hero of the series) makes a mistake and does just that, removing any negotiating leverage he might have had. The bad guy immediately shoots good guy #1. Of course.

Now comes the part where I say that even the wackiest gun nuts have a point. It's one they've been making for a long time, but it sure does ring true this week. The truth of the matter is, banning certain models of assault rifles will not prevent another Columbine-style massacre. Witness the recent murders in Germany.

A kid, expelled from school, walked back into that school and killed 17 people. He did this without the benefit of an assault rifle (from what I've read, he used a handgun and a regular hunting rifle) and despite national gun laws that make the Brady Bill seem like a hunting-season flier from Wal-Mart.

While it is true that many fewer people are killed by guns in countries where it is much more difficult to buy a gun than here in the U.S., no law (or series of laws) has stopped gun violence altogether. And even if guns didn't exist, certain pathologically crazy folks would still take it upon themselves to kill as many people as possible, even if their sole choice of weapon was, say, a single grain of sand

The simple truth is that we cannot write laws that will protect the public from crazy people. Ariel Sharon is facing this fact now. His actions have provoked a hatred so sublime that there are thousands of Palestinians (and I don't think that number is an exaggeration) who would consider it an honor to kill themselves as long as they took a few Israelis with them. Sure, antipathy existed in the past, but not on this scale. It took monsters like Sharon and a few mullahs to turn teenaged Palestinians into suicide bombers. I think we can all agree that if sanity includes a certain self-interest in living, acting as a suicide bomber makes one crazy by definition.

And for all the hoo-ha about "Homeland Security" (who thought up that silly name, anyway, some hack at the Heritage Foundation?), no government agency can protect every single citizen of the United States against a terrorist attack. Even if we closed our borders to all immigration and became a totalitarian police state, we wouldn't be able to assure all "law-abiding" citizens (another decidedly dicey term) that they wouldn't be killed by a terrorist.

Making sure the cockpit doors on airplanes lock and cannot be forced is a good idea, one so obviously necessary I wonder why it was never implemented in the past. Trashing the old INS and replacing it with two new agencies is, likewise, an idea whose time has come. But making people take off their shoes before they get on airplanes doesn't do anything but make people mad. There are plenty of places other than shoes where a person could hide enough C4 to blow up a plane. The anus immediately comes to mind, but I don't think it would be necessary to take the radical step of shoving stuff inside your body. Men and women could simply improve the shapes of their packages (if you know what I mean) and get by without a care. And if we become able to credibly screen for C4, then those who wish to create carnage would use some other high explosive that isn't being scrutinized. The terrorists have a huge advantage. There are very few of them and the United States is a huge country. A needle in a haystack is Mount Rushmore by comparison.

If you gave me a million bucks and six months, I could buy enough fissionable material to build a crude atomic bomb, build the bomb, smuggle it kit-and-caboodle into the U.S. and detonate it. I'm not exceptionally knowledgeable about the international radioactive isotope community, but money could buy that influence. Sure, my crude blundering might throw up some flags and get me arrested, but then again, I wouldn't count on it. Likewise, there are hundreds of books that describe the basics of making an atom bomb. I've read a couple of them, and what I can tell you is that the theory is pretty simple; it's the execution that's a bitch. Even so, if I simply exploded a device that included a fair quantity of weapons-grade plutonium without actually triggering a nuclear explosion (what some folks call a "dirty bomb"), a large number of people would be sickened and die from radiation poisoning.

There comes a time when we have to stop spending every waking moment trying to defend ourselves against crazy people (an impossible task) and simply get on with living our lives. Do we really need an endless war against terrorism? Do we really need to attack Iraq and get rid of some two-bit dictator? Did we really need to tacitly encourage a coup in Venezuela against a democratically-elected president for the benefit of a few oil buddies?

Okay, so the answer to that last question should be obvious to anyone whose last name isn't Bush or Cheney. But the first two questions are worth asking and debating. The time has come to quit worrying obsessively about the crazy people and begin focusing on making America a better, and not merely a wee bit safer, place to live. As a certain Prez said not so long ago, it's time to get America moving again. And that means putting away the scare tactics and ceaseless warmongering. That means acting as not only the most powerful, but also the best nation on earth.

I think we have it in us. I really do.

Jon Worley is founder of Homebrewers Opposed to Presidential Stupidity.