Let's start with the sane.

1. Dancing With The Stars. Sara Evans, who is almost a year younger than me, even though she looks five years older, is in the midst of what's going to be an ugly divorce. Her husband, Craig Schelske, a darling of the Republican Party, is apparently an adulterer and a porn addict.

Beautiful. At the start of the DWTS, Tom DeLay sent a note to supporters saying they should throw their votes to Sara because she and her husband were good God-fearing GOP supporters, while Jerry Springer (a competitor on the show) was a pinko Commie liberal.

Can you say schadenfreude?

2. Fergie. She looks like the meth addict she used to be, but in a hot sort of way. Like you know you might catch something if you were with her but you just don't care. It's worth the risk.

After criticizing her new record, "London Bridge," for months, I must now recognize her entire album's greatness. However, "The Dutchess" is in a different classification from music. This is what I call "production pop," sounds that emanate from a CD that don't really resemble a collection of songs but rather a collection of sounds that just kind of sound cool together. It's not a songwriting masterpiece by any means, but it is solid, solid piece of production work. And, I won't deny enjoying it.

Rolling Stone liked it, too: 3.5 stars.

Now, the insane.

For the umpteenth time in the past several weeks in Oklahoma, a murder-suicide has cost the lives of multiple people. That's the nature of such a tragedy -- multiple deaths for the price of none. However, in Pauls Valley on Tuesday, three kids were caught in that crossfire.

My hunch is that the father and the mother were going through a spat, and she probably decided to leave him. He probably thought, "Nah, but I know how to really hurt you." So, he did this unspeakable deed.

Truth is, I don't know a darned thing about what happened here, but I bet I'm not too far off. Either that, or the family was drowning in debt, or the father was a molester, or something equally vile.

The culture that allows for such a thing has nothing to do with the lack of a Christian God in schools, the workplace or our government. The world that makes a murder-suicide so easy isn't born of unenforced laws, too much TV or rap music.

No, the culture that makes tragedies like this possible is the one that worships the handgun. Easy access to weapons meant for only one thing -- to kill another human -- is the primary reason we see so many of these tragedies. Leaving crazy people to less efficient instruments of death, such as knives, rocks or their own hands, might not produce fewer murders over the course of a long period of time, but they would certainly make it tougher for the depressed, insane, hopeless and desperate to commit vile acts of violence easily, quickly and without a second thought.

It's absolutely insane. We can do things to curb domestic violence through education, law enforcement and victim support. However, there is very little we can do within a culture that is hellbent on dying at the hands of a misinterpretation of a constitutional amendment to keep otherwise mentally stable people from making an end-game decision with the only instrument that makes it instantaneously possible -- a gun.

Sorry. The problem IS the gun.