There are certain thoughts that rush through everyone’s mind when confronted with images of the mass murders of September 11th. Shock; fear; thoughts of loved ones, anger at our country’s enemies, frustration at an inability to help others in the midst of disaster.

I doubt many people shared my thoughts on that bright morning in September. I stood in my apartment in front of the television, unshaven and sweating from a morning workout, and thought of a doorway.

You can seek it out if you visit the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Named the Document Entrance, it’s the door used by many Capitol Hill staffers and journalists to gain easy access to the Galleries upstairs, and avoid the traffic jam of daily tourists.

Three years ago, I walked out of another bright morning in July into the Document Entrance, two hours ahead of a gunman. I remember nodding hello to the tall black policeman who was standing at the metal detector in front of the door, but I don’t remember if he smiled back.

At 3:40 that afternoon, Russell Weston Jr. stepped into the air conditioning of the Capitol Bldg. through that same door. He took five short steps across the tiles to where the officer on duty, 58-year-old J.J. Chestnut, was writing down directions for a group of tourists who had just finished the official tour. Weston raised his gun with speed and silence and put a .38-caliber bullet through the back of Chestnut’s head.

Chestnut never saw his killer. He dropped to the ground, his tall frame collapsing in a heap, flecks of his blood covering the clothes of the 15-year-old in front of him.

Doug McMillan, an officer who was walking toward the Document Entrance through "the crypt," the basement under the Capitol dome, saw Chestnut hit the floor. Yelling a warning to bystanders and congressional staff, McMillan threw his own body in front of a group of tourists, drew his gun and exchanged fire with Weston.

Weston ran confused from McMillan and followed a woman running for cover in the "Private Entrance" door, the back door to Majority Whip Tom DeLay’s suite. Weston ran through it, directly into the path of Special Agent John Gibson, DeLay’s personal bodyguard.

Inside DeLay’s office complex, Gibson heard the sound of gunfire and bellowed through the office for DeLay and his staff to take cover under desks and furniture. Gibson was a tall man with a tough Boston accent and, at 42, still had the muscular bulk of a former football player. Bracing his arm against the back exit doorframe, Gibson reached for his gun.

When the woman rushed through the doorway with Weston at her heels, Gibson acted fast, pushing the woman to safety as he yelled for Weston to drop the gun, shielding her from the spray of lead that caught him right across the chest.

Gibson jerked back, his torso covered in blood, but kept his footing. Weston fired again, his bullets drilling into Gibson’s body. The guard fired back five times: Weston recoiled at a shot to his knee, then dropped to the carpet with a gaping hole in his stomach.

Outside was chaos. No one knew what had happened. The TV cameras were already setting up, but no one knew what to report–only that gunfire had been heard inside the Capitol. The ambulances couldn’t get through the barriers and had to roll over the sidewalks and grass. Officers tried to escort the panicked tourists from the building, some screaming about fire, others a bomb–they hadn’t seen Weston. I heard an officer yelling, "Does anyone understand Japanese?" Some reporters were claiming that an explosion had erupted in the crypt, and debated whether it could be a prank, or terrorism; people whispered, "Arabs?"

Inside, John Gibson slumped to the floor against the oak desk next to the door, slowly and quietly bleeding to death as the paramedics arrived. Chestnut was pronounced dead at George Washington University Medical Center. After five hours of emergency room operation, only Weston survived.

It took several days for most of the papers to unravel fact from fiction in Russell Weston’s rampage through the Capitol on that hot Friday in 1998. Most observers agreed there was little the Capitol Police could have done to stop a determined and deranged gunman like Weston. A short man with thinning hair and squinting blue eyes, he’d told Montana neighbors that the "cannibals" in the government were using a "Ruby Surveillance System" to spy on him. He’d been in and out of clinics and mental hospitals, and the Secret Service had listed him as a "potential low-level threat."

In the three years since the Capitol Shootings, Weston has been at the center of a legal battle over treatment with antipsychotics and court-ordered evaluations. Here’s the deal: If Weston is competent, he could face the death penalty. If he doesn’t take any medication, he isn’t competent. If he isn’t competent, quid pro quo, he doesn’t get the death penalty. Therefore, Weston’s lawyers block the court-ordered treatment. They now argue that Weston has gone so many years without treatment that his brain might not respond to antipsychotic medications. They keep him nuts, inhuman, trapped in the twists and turns of his psyche. They avoid a trial. They avoid justice.

Today, Weston sits in his padded cell in North Carolina, swathed in a medical blanket, bearded and unkempt, his blue eyes rolling around his head with dizzying speed. He picks at his self-inflicted scabs and lets his mind wander on invented paths.

Our society today often disdains the idea of justice, preferring peace at any price. In the past few weeks, many professors and students across college campuses echoed the claims of the signs and leaflets of anti-American protestors — that this attack is as much America’s fault as anything else, that all of America’s foreign aid to Afghanistan is still insufficient, and that any military response would be nothing but an act of unholy vengeance. I’ve even heard some voice the opinion that they are legitimately torn by President Bush’s query, "Are you with us, or with the terrorists?"

By any moral measure, our responses to Russell Weston and his crimes have been a complete and utter failure. No trial. No verdict. No denunciation. Nothing.

The message of the anti-American demonstrators in Washington and elsewhere is ultimately no different. A famous passage of the Mishnah, the first section of the Jewish Talmud, lays down that to murder a man is to destroy a whole world. For the extremists and reactionaries, destroying worlds is no big deal any more.

We must not therapeutize ourselves back into the world before September 11. We must not grief-counsel our righteous fury away, allowing the psychiatrists to work wonders on our sorrow and forget our agonized tears on the comfort of the analysts’ couch or the oak of the church pew.

David Gelernter, the Yale professor and Unabomber target, once observed that while we cannot hold society accountable for failing to prevent an evil act, we can and must hold it responsible for failing to condemn it. Whenever a terrorist murders a man, the responsibility falls to us, as a society, to respond. Evil men will always exist, and they will do evil things. It is the communal response to an evil act that matters. It must resound with dignity, assurance and absolute clarity. Moral bankruptcy must be matched with a clear moral answer.

Until we respond, we will be confronted by the faces, the names, the images, the acrid taste of fear and despair. If we allow a communal verdict without response, we are complicit in the terrorists’ sin. We are haunted as a nation by unresolved evil — we dine at Macbeth's every night, and pretend not to see Banquo's ghost.

The American community will either seal the defeat by shrugging it off or, by admitting this was a defeat, and a painful one, turn it into a kind of victory: a reaffirmation that evil will always exist, but we will never accept it, never let it slide, never give it the easy way out. We will fight it. We will give our lives fighting it.

That’s what John Gibson and J.J. Chestnut dramatized so eloquently in death. They saved those of us inside the Capitol building in the same way that civilizations have been saved, time and time again: by little groups of men standing at the gates, who had nothing to offer but their lives. They are the New York firemen and the police officers, the volunteers who rushed into collapsing buildings trying to save the lives of complete strangers. Men and women who did their duty, held the line, kept the breach, and fell in the process, Passover lambs leaving only scarlet doorposts as a sign of their sacrifice.