Sadly, I remember this day; it was the first time I had heard the term homegrown terrorist, I could not believe that someone that was born and raised in the great United States of America could have done such a horrible thing to his own people. Unfortunately, the term homegrown terrorist is readily used now, and it is scary how many Americans can do such unspeakable acts to our own people in our great nation. However, on a sunny spring morning in April 1995, the biggest act of mass murder in the United States occurred when a Ryder rental truck pulled into the parking area of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. The driver, later identified as Timothy McVeigh casually walked away, minutes later the truck exploded into a fireball …show more content…
Subsequently, he was executed for his crime and he remains the only terrorist to be executed by the federal government in the United States (Gorman, 2015). Timothy McVeigh was born on April 23, 1968, in Lockport, New York. After his parents divorced, he lived with his father and developed an interest in guns through target practice with his grandfather. McVeigh was a bullied teenager, and he was very bright, even earning a partial college scholarship after graduating from high school in 1986, although he only attended briefly before dropping out. In 1988, McVeigh enlisted in the United States Army and became a model soldier, earning a Bronze Star for bravery in the Persian Gulf War. Furthermore, he received an invitation to try out for the Army’s Special Forces but gave up after two days ("Timothy McVeigh", 2017). McVeigh accepted the Army’s offer of an early discharge and left in the fall of 1991. At the time, the Ame4rican military was downsizing after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because of the Cold War’s end, McVeigh shifted his ideology from a hatred of foreign communist governments to a distrust of the United States federal government, especially as its new leader, Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, had efficaciously campaigned for the presidency on a platform of gun control ("Oklahoma City bombing - Facts & Summary - History.com", 2009). Moreover, McVeigh initially returned to New York but took up the peripatetic lifestyle as he followed the gun show circuit, where he sold weapons and preached the evils of the government. In addition, McVeigh periodically spent time with his Army friends Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, who shared his passion for guns and hatred of federal authority. McVeigh’s rising anger was fueled by a few events. First, in the summer of 1992, white separatist Randy Weaver was engaged in a standoff