On April 19, 1995, I entered the break room at the Sewell’s Point clinic at Naval Station Norfolk for lunch. As always, the television was on. Rather than Days of Our Lives or whatever was typically on at that time, the news apparently preempted regular programming. We were learning of a devastating explosion at the federal building in Oklahoma City.
My first thought was that we were going to war.
I might have been right if the bombing were the result of foreign terrorism, but the killing of so many people wasn’t the result of Islamic extremism or anything like that.
No, it was homegrown.
Timothy McVeigh parked a truck loaded with fertilizer and fuel oil, detonated it, and killed 167 people, many of whom were children who were in a daycare facility inside the federal building. About 700 others were injured.
As I look at the many massacres that have taken place in American history that either didn’t involve firearms or where current laws would have done nothing to stop them, this one looms large.
Not only was a firearm not used, but the attack was in response to the ATF’s reaction in cases like Ruby Ridge and Waco. That’s right, the attack happened not in spite of gun control, but because of it.
I’m not about to excuse McVeigh’s actions. Killing innocent people is never the answer to anything. It doesn’t win anyone over, it doesn’t precipitate needed change, nothing. It only hardens people’s hearts and pushes them away.
But the truth is that without gun control and a Department of Justice that was more interested in cracking down on scary people than, you know, justice, the incidents that motivated the killing would never have happened.
Further, McVeigh and his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, had guns and didn’t use them in the attack. They decided to go with something more devastating.
Hence, a massive truck bomb.
And this wasn’t a pickup truck, either. Think Ryder rental truck like you’d use for moving all of your stuff, only loaded with an explosive payload.
For the record, while it’s not particularly easy to get, one can still get the fertilizer and fuel oil is unrestricted.
Two men killed nearly 170 people and injured hundreds upon hundreds more, and they didn’t need a firearm at all. Even if you take out the fact that this was arguably carried out because of gun control, it’s still a sign that gun control doesn’t stop terrible attacks.
This massacre was worse than the Route 91 Festival shooting in Las Vegas. It killed a little more than two and a half times as many people. While more people were injured in Las Vegas, it wasn’t so many that it somehow dwarfs the death toll.
And this is the second-worst attack on American soil. The worst one, 9/11, also didn’t use firearms.
As I’ve said throughout all of these looks at past massacres, guns aren’t required for the killing of a lot of innocent people. All that’s required is a strong enough desire to murder a whole lot of people.
As they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way. That doesn’t just apply to the things we like.
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