There’s been a lot of agonizing about what is going on in America lately — why are mass-shootings becoming so common, what’s going on?
Michelle Goldberg writing in The NY Times has put her finger on a very unsettling point.
Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing terrorist who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, cared about one issue above all others: guns. To him, guns were synonymous with freedom, and any government attempt to regulate them meant incipient tyranny.
“When it came to guns,” writes Jeffrey Toobin in “Homegrown,” his compelling new book about the Oklahoma City attack, “McVeigh did more than simply advocate for his own right to own and use firearms; he joined an ascendant political crusade, which grew more extreme over the course of his lifetime and beyond.”
Reading Toobin’s book, it’s startling to realize how much McVeigh’s cause has advanced in the decades since his 2001 execution. McVeigh, who was a member of the K.K.K. and harbored a deep resentment of women, hoped that blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building would inspire an army of followers to make war on the government. This didn’t happen immediately, although, as the historian Kathleen Belew has written, there was a wave of militia and white supremacist violence in the bombing’s aftermath. But today, an often-inchoate movement of people who share many of McVeigh’s views is waging what increasingly looks like a low-level insurgency against the rest of us.
The statements of McVeigh's beliefs at the wikipedia entry on him sound all too familiar today to those now mainstreamed by Republicans and their media.
McVeigh wrote letters to local newspapers complaining about taxes. In 1992, he wrote:
Taxes are a joke. Regardless of what a political candidate "promises," they will increase. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement. They mess up. We suffer. Taxes are reaching cataclysmic levels, with no slowdown in sight. [...] Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that. But it might.[29]
McVeigh also wrote to Representative John J. LaFalce (D–New York),[30] complaining about the arrest of a woman for carrying mace:
It is a lie if we tell ourselves that the police can protect us everywhere at all times. Firearms restrictions are bad enough, but now a woman can't even carry Mace in her purse?[30]
...In 1993, McVeigh drove to Waco, Texas, during the Waco siege to show his support. At the scene, he distributed pro-gun rightsliterature and bumper stickers bearing slogans such as, "When guns are outlawed, I will become an outlaw." He told a student reporter:
The government is afraid of the guns people have because they have to have control of the people at all times. Once you take away the guns, you can do anything to the people. You give them an inch and they take a mile. I believe we are slowly turning into a socialist government. The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful, and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control.[36][37]
The wikipedia entry on McVeigh’s life reads like what is now a practically the type specimen for so many of the people who carry out a mass-exercise of their second amendment rights, although now their rage seems to be directed on the general population rather than specific government targets. McVeigh needed a truck bomb to create mass casualties; it can now be done with the pull of a trigger.
How did we get to this point 28 years later?
...The reason that America endures a level of gun violence unique among developed countries, and that we can often do little about it, is so many [Republican*] politicians have views on guns that aren’t far afield from McVeigh’s. As Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, has pointed out, it’s become common to hear Republicans echo McVeigh’s insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment, which holds that Americans must be allowed to amass personal arsenals in case they need to overthrow the government. As the MAGA congresswomen Lauren Boebert once put it, the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants.”
The Republican Party’s fetishization of guns and its fetishization of insurrection — one that’s reached a hysterical pitch since Donald Trump’s presidency — go hand in hand. Guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve. And so in the wake of mass shootings, when the public is most likely to clamor for gun regulations, Republicans regularly shore up gun access instead. In April, following a school shooting in Nashville, Republicans expelled two young Black Democratic legislators who’d led a gun control protest at the Tennessee Capitol. A few days later, the State Senate passed a bill protecting the gun industry from lawsuits.
* Inserted word that should have been there.
Read the whole thing. What’s chilling is how Goldberg notes where we are now with her conclusion:
As it happens, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, before the authorities knew who McVeigh was, he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop and then arrested for carrying a gun without a permit. In 2019, however, Oklahoma legalized permitless carry. Under the new law, McVeigh would have been let go.
Every day in every way, the Republican Party is fanning the flames of stochastic terrorism. They have mainstreamed the madness that used to be a right-wing fringe view. (Note here the Texas Republican echoing the ‘government tyranny’ trope that McVeigh would have agreed with.)
A vote for any Republican anywhere is a vote for Timothy McVeigh’s world.
UPDATE: Jamelle Bouie writing about “A Gun-Filled America Is a World of Fear and Alienation” nails it with this observation about Republicans and guns:
...Which might be the point for conservatives who want that world — who want, in a sense, that “polite society.” Because one thing that will survive is hierarchy and force and the power to make others bend to your will. And if they refuse? If they insist on their right to live free of fear?
Well, that’s what the guns are for.