On April 19, 1995, two white supremacist militia members set off a truck bomb outside the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, OK, killing 168 people, including 19 children. Five hundred more were injured in the enormous blast which ripped off the front of the building:
"Timothy McVeigh, a veteran of the Gulf War and a sympathizer with the U.S. militia movement, planned and carried out the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh detonated the Ryder rental truck full of explosives that he parked in front of the building.
Terry Nichols, a fellow veteran who met McVeigh during their time in the U.S. Army, assisted in the planning and preparation of the bombing.
In a federal case, McVeigh received the death sentence for his role in the bombing and the deaths of eight federal agents. He was executed by lethal injection in 2001. Nichols was sentenced in the federal case to life in prison without the possibility of release. [snip]
The Ruby Ridge standoff of 1992 and the 1993 Waco siege came just two years before the bombing. However, McVeigh's plans had already started forming and instead only solidified the view that the government was going to disarm the public and take away the Second Amendment right, according to History.com.
McVeigh chose to bomb the Murrah Building on the two-year anniversary of the fire at Waco that left 75 members of the Branch Davidian religious sect dead, 25 of whom were children. Before his 2001 execution, McVeigh said that he intended the 1995 bombing to be retribution for the deaths at Ruby Ridge and Waco, History.com reports." (our emphasis)
The bombing marked the first major exhibition of the right-wing's virulent, anti-government movement's willingness to use violence to strike back against what they saw was a violation of their Second Amendment rights, a core feature of right-wing beliefs which, if anything, is stronger today with rulings by the Supreme Court and actions by the Malignant Fascist in each of his terms in office against gun safety. The red flag couldn't have been more clear then, and it's has largely been dismissed or explained away since then.
(photo: Associated Press)
Horrible tragedy. I was on I40 trucking westbound heading towards Amarillo TX that day and went through about an hour before that happened. Thankfully McVeigh and Nichols names have become nothing more than trivia in the years since.
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