Between Hitler’s birthday, the first shots of the American Revolution, the Waco massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing, April is the time of year when all US right-wingers celebrate their misplaced beliefs.
This year is particularly special to the extreme right because their messiah, Timothy McVeigh, faces execution in May. Upon his death, he will become their first high-profile martyr to sacrifice himself for their movement.
The first of many.
On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh packed a Ryder truck with a gigantic bomb and destroyed the Alfred Murrah FBI building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
168 people died.
McVeigh would later claim that his reasons for the act revolved around his perception of Federal government behavior at Ruby Ridge, Waco and the passage of the Brady Bill.
Those reasons alone make McVeigh look beyond unreasonable. Knowing the details of each grievance makes him look cold and weak.
Ruby Ridge is a case where an Idaho white supremacist, Randy Weaver, bought illegal sawed-off shotguns from undercover Federal agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. When agents descended on Weaver’s home, the officers on the scene were using a “shoot on sight” order.
“Shoot on sight” is commonly referred to as “murder”.
Weaver’s wife died holding her child when she strayed into an agent’s crosshairs.
The courts cleared Weaver on the fact that he was entrapped on the weapons sale. Justice settled with the Weaver family for over one million dollars.
Weaver shouldn’t have shown an interest in illegal weapons. The agents in charge should have been smarter than to engage in John Wayne-style “shoot on sight” orders. It was a disaster for everyone involved.
Upsetting? Yes. Worth killing over 160 people? No.
One year later, federal agents found themselves in another FUBAR situation with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. The religious group had their own views about God, chose to live together on a compound and kept an inventory of weapons like millions of others in the Lone Star State.
Religion, assembly and arms are all protected by the Constitution. Unlike Ruby Ridge, there is no real way to check the facts of who the Davidians really were against the propaganda used to minimize public relations damage to the government. The official line was that Koresh was a violent, child-molesting, wife stealing cult leader of a group bent on mass suicide to achieve salvation with God.
The way to solve this problem was to run a tank through the building and burn everyone alive. Dead men, women and children tell no tales.
Even if Koresh lived up to the hype, the Federal response was still unwarranted.
Upsetting? Yes. Worth killing over 160 people? No.
The last major issue McVeigh had was the Brady Bill. Passed in 1993, the bill requires background checks and a waiting period before gun purchases. The bill is named after James Brady who caught a bullet in his head so it wouldn’t end up in President Reagan.
Background checks are definitely not upsetting and are a poor excuse for a terrorist act.
For these reasons, Timothy McVeigh decided to destroy a Federal building and everyone in it. In his eyes, the Ruby Ridge and Waco orders were issued from Oklahoma. The only way to complain about his suspicions would be through explosives.
McVeigh is not unique. There are thousands of scumbags in this country with the wherewithal to build bombs and the necessary human detachment to consider children to be “collateral damage”. McVeigh inspires these clones to plot their copy-cat terrorist acts.
The government might take their guns. The government might make them wait to buy one. If those thoughts trigger an inspiration to destroy lives in just one percent of all clinically insane, military trained, emotionally unstable white males, this country has a domestic terrorism problem that will get worse before it gets better.
McVeigh was not alone. It’s just short of impossible to destroy one-third of a federal building and nearly everyone in it by a one or two man mission. The official line is that McVeigh financed his explosives through trading arms over two years. Even if he ran a little “arms for bombs” operation, is a Ryder truck enough to destroy one-third of a very large building?
The case in point is that the World Trade Center had a similar truck bomb and the explosion went up only about four stories. The Murrah building almost disappeared. Something bigger than a backyard bomb exploded on that day.
Like the explosives in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995, McVeigh and his clones are a bigger problem than anyone is prepared to acknowledge.
