For those of you with short memories or a naive optimism about the human race, here is a list of mass murders that have occurred in the last few months.

April 15: Sergei Babarin, age 71, kills two people and wounds four others in the Mormon Family History Library in Salt Lake City. Police kill him in a shootout.

April 20: Dylan Klebold, 17 and Eric Harris, 18, kill 13 people and then themselves at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado.

May 20: Six students at Heritage High School in Conyers, GA are wounded by T.J. Solomon, a 15-year-old.

June 3: Zane Floyd, 23, kills four employees of a Las Vegas grocery store.

June 11: Joseph Brooks, 27, kills his former psychiatrist, a woman and wounds four others before killing himself.

July 2-4: Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, 21, kills two people and injures nine in a three day shooting spree through Illinois and Indiana. After a police chase, he kills himself.

July 12: Six members of an Atlanta family, including four children, are shot to death by Cyrano Marks, the live-in boyfriend of the childrens mother. Cyrano then kills himself.

July 24: Cary Stayner, a hotel handyman, confesses to killing four women in Yosemite National Park.

July 29: Mark Barton kills nine people and wounds 13 at two brokerage firms in Atlanta, then kills himself. He had previously murdered his two children and his wife the day before.

Aug. 5: Alan Eugene Miller, 34, kills two co-workers at their office in Pelham, Ala., then kills a third person at a company where he used to work.

Aug. 10: Buford O’Neal Furrow wounds five, including four children at a summer day camp and kills a mailman.

Mr. Furrow was a member of a Nazi hategroup with a viral pedigree. He had been married to Betty Matthews, the widow of Robert Matthews, who was killed by federal agents in 1985. Mr. Matthews was the founder of The Order, a hate group that believes Jews descend from Satan and blacks from animals, and that members of both groups should be killed.

This list does not include recent spousal murders, a form of mass murder, given the damage done to the children and other members of the family. Half the murders in Maine are now spousal murder-suicides. Last week, Carol Cross of Lewiston was killed by her long-time boyfriend and father of her three children even though she had brought a policeman and two friends to deliver the protection from abuse order. He then killed himself.

Is this not a society devolving into a self-mutilating chaos?

The velocity of these horrors begins to resemble an insurrection of the hateful. These are terrorist acts, destroying innocent lives, with messages so devoid of sense and reason as to be ignored in the blood and death. The teen-age killers in Columbine werent going to be made fun of anymore; the daytrader in Atlanta blamed his financial losses on others, the Los Angeles hate-monger decided that Jews were responsible for his loneliness and attacked pre-school children. Madness, hatred, idiocy. We have become a culture of victims. It’s always someone else’s fault.

Our proposed solutions seem pathetically inept. Better gun control laws? There are 192 million firearms in America today, 2 million military-style automatic weapons. Remember the anti-nuclear weapon slogan, enough bombs to make the rubble bounce? We now have enough bullets to puncture every vital human organ on the planet. There’s a milestone. Yet we can’t agree on the mere registry of guns. Violence and mayhem co-star in most of the detritus masquerading as movies and music these days, but censoring the messenger seems impotent, at best. Morality and character development have been relegated to the broom closet in our public schools, but some have countered with displaying the Ten Commandments on hallway walls. Our nation’s public life is littered with small-minded politicians who are capable of little more than reading polls, but statesmen and stateswomen seem extinct. We live to purchase and consume, amen.

Historically, Americans have come together when facing a dire enemy that threatens our nation. But who or what is the enemy now? The easy accessibility of weapons? The loss of community? Leaders with no morality? The absence of standards of civility? Individual responsibility obfuscated by psychological excuses? Evil?

Mainers are known for their common sense and good judgment. How about sharing your thoughts with us. What’s going on? What should we do about it? Any ideas out there?