Poster Boy for the Gun Culture
May 8, 2001
by birdman

New books and TV interviews are offering insights into the psyche of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who, if he�s going to get his message out, had better do so in a hurry since he's scheduled to be syringed to death on May 16.

McVeigh says that he didn't know that there was a day care center in the Murrah Federal building and that if he had known it he might have switched targets because the day care center represented a lot of "collateral damage." He expresses no remorse over the fate of the children but recognizes that it was, shall we say, bad PR. McVeigh initially acknowledged having seen the outline of a crib in one of the windows as he drove up to the building, but couldn't postpone his actions because the date (April 19) was too important because its relevance to the Waco fire. McVeigh later denied seeing the crib.

The psychiatrist who evaluated McVeigh indicates that he can go into tirades about the children killed at Waco but does not relate at all to the children killed by his bomb. He claims that when Congress banned certain assault weapons, "I snapped." McVeigh says that, "What the U.S. government did at Waco and Ruby Ridge was dirty and I gave dirty back to them at Oklahoma City."

There's a familiar pattern here. McVeigh was fascinated by guns from a young age, his parents were detached and uninvolved. He claims to have been bullied as a child (where have we heard that before? ) and says that he began to feel during his Army years that the federal government was the "biggest bully in the world." He says that he was influenced by reading the "Turner Diaries," a novel that is near sacred scripture to the anti-government crazies.

So what we have here is the ultimate school shooting, an insanely criminal act that came about because of feelings of persecution. But McVeigh's feelings of persecution are far more insidious than those of the average high school kid. The kid is usually really being picked on. McVeigh's feelings of persecution are the result of a stream of disinformation that was fed to him by a subculture that thrives and profits from disseminating disinformation.

What we see in McVeigh is the product of the gun/militia subculture that tells its adherents that the government and all conventional sources of information are telling lies designed to enslave them. Religious cults use the same technique with some success. Groups like this will tell their people to rely only certain sources of information � the group itself is, of course, one of the few truthtellers. The gun subculture has venues that religious cults never enjoyed, however - talk radio and the Internet (although McVeigh himself probably made little or no use of the 'Net). McVeigh is basically an even more frightening version of the Columbine killers, hearing only voices that reinforce his fears and coldly plotting to do away with imaginary villains.

The Waco incident has been investigated to death and each time it's been found that the Davidians set their building on fire and were responsible for their own deaths. In fact, although the children were portrayed by some as victims of the government, five of them were killed not by the fire but by the Davidians themselves, presumably for the crime of wanting to live. Four were shot and one was hacked to death by a knife. All this information is available to the public (and was available even before McVeigh's terrorist act) but public knowledge is rather irrelevant when you convince people that everyone's lying to them. In fact, there are still imbeciles out there claiming that it was a government plot and all the evidence has been covered up.

You can check out WorldNetDaily or drop in on the loony birds at Free Republic to see how writers like Claire Wolfe or Vin Suprynowicz work hard to feed the psychosis of the gun culture. They'll tell you about the New World Order, a shadowy very powerful group that is somehow connected to the UN and is on the verge of subjugating the U.S. But of course they first have to take everybody's guns because they know that toothless patriots with handguns and camouflage outfits will thwart their efforts and drive them back to the diversity seminars that spawned them.

The potential McVeighs haven't gone away. There have been arrests of other militia types in recent years who were planning terrorist acts. There is currently a crackpot named John Gray in Texas who is facing charges of assaulting an officer and has holed himself and his family up on his ranch, daring authorities to come and get him. He claims to be a victim of the New World Order (of course) and has been getting support from a local talk show host (what else?).

McVeigh himself has no choice but to continue to believe the lies that led to the Oklahoma City bombing. How else would he bring himself to deal with the fact that he had killed all those people, and was sitting in a prison cell awaiting a poison spike in his arm because he had been misinformed? Unfortunately, the next McVeigh is probably already surfing the 'Net or listening to some radio talk show and becoming convinced that dark unseen forces are controlling the world and have to be stopped.

Fearful, insecure, well-armed people battling a supposedly all-powerful enemy that doesn't even exist. It's probably going to get even more people killed.