Helicopters were still hovering over the one-room schoolhouse when the poking and prodding began. If the unimaginable can happen in the peace-loving Amish community, how can the rest of us – the “English” is what the plain sects call us – ever be safe?

Or was it Amish naiveté that allowed the unthinkable to happen?

Amish children attend school in an isolated place with no modern communication at a time when security in our public school buildings rivals a county prison.

Amish children routinely ride scooters or bicycles along the back roads of Lancaster County without adult supervision, while their suburban peers spend their leisure time on a soccer field under a watchful parent’s eye.

Amish children often tend vegetable or flower stands, counting change to strangers who stop at their farms, while we “English” teach our children to run screaming from anyone unfamiliar.

The Amish remain trusting, even as suburbia overruns their farms and pushy tourists shove cameras in their faces. We “English” are suspicious of everyone, using modern technology to ensure the new neighbor doesn’t appear on Megan’s List, the family doctor isn’t being sued for malpractice, and the baby sitter isn’t abusing our kids. In the end, no matter how many barriers we erect, we remain vulnerable.

As reporters peppered officials with questions about minute details of the Amish schoolhouse killings, I was struck by one sentence uttered by Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. “You can make all the changes you want, but you can never stop a random act of violence by someone intent on killing himself,” Rendell said.

Amen.

In the aftermath of Monday’s horror – and two other school shootings last week – President Bush announced he is bringing together education and law enforcement types to discuss prevention and coping. And in the Pennsylvania Legislature, the gun debate drones on, with both sides using the most recent violence to shore up their point.

While lawmakers try to make a name for themselves devising ways to protect all of the people all of the time, five children are gone forever. They were called Naomi Rose, Anna Mae, Marian, Mary Liz and Lena. They ranged in age from 7 to 13. They undoubtedly ran barefoot in the summer and crowded into the back of their parents’ black buggies to attend church at a neighbor’s home every other Sunday.

These girls were killed by a monster, the kind who terrifies us in children’s books. In children’s books, someone more powerful or more pure emerges to slay the monster so everyone can live happily ever after.

As adults, we hunger to hold on to the fairy tale, to believe in the happy ending, so we pile on laws and add locks and install security cameras.

Life, however, falls under nonfiction, a place where, all too often, the monster slaughters the innocents.