On this day...
1997 - An unrepentant Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death for the Oklahoma City bombing.
This was a deranged cat. Another Army guy gone wrong. This appears to be a common theme. I'm certainly not condoning what he had done, but I'm saying that these kinds of deranged acts seem to happen frequently from veterans of foreign wars (I haven't looked this up, but I believe he was in the first Iraq war). Could we everyday civilians even fathom what they must endure day-in and day-out for God knows how long, say, 18 months, at least? I mean, what would drive a guy to the edge of insanity? Drugs? Visions of close friends getting their arms and legs blown off? Walking with a friend and he gets sniped instead of you? Are there poisonous gasses in the air which corrode the mind? What? What is it that causes this brutality?
But I'm sure that there genuinely are people who are just deranged from the get-go, going into the Department of Defense. But then I ask, how do they not detect these people? In performing even the most menial task, there are some sort of psychological tests that have to be administered. So how is there not one for people handling guns and explosives? My only thought is that they are so desperate for these recruits that they will just bring them in off the streets.
So who do we blame? The government? The person? His parents? Just who, exactly? Whomever we decide takes the blame, I'm sure the accused have their tracks well covered and ready to blame the next guy.
This was a deranged cat. Another Army guy gone wrong. This appears to be a common theme. I'm certainly not condoning what he had done, but I'm saying that these kinds of deranged acts seem to happen frequently from veterans of foreign wars (I haven't looked this up, but I believe he was in the first Iraq war). Could we everyday civilians even fathom what they must endure day-in and day-out for God knows how long, say, 18 months, at least? I mean, what would drive a guy to the edge of insanity? Drugs? Visions of close friends getting their arms and legs blown off? Walking with a friend and he gets sniped instead of you? Are there poisonous gasses in the air which corrode the mind? What? What is it that causes this brutality?
But I'm sure that there genuinely are people who are just deranged from the get-go, going into the Department of Defense. But then I ask, how do they not detect these people? In performing even the most menial task, there are some sort of psychological tests that have to be administered. So how is there not one for people handling guns and explosives? My only thought is that they are so desperate for these recruits that they will just bring them in off the streets.
So who do we blame? The government? The person? His parents? Just who, exactly? Whomever we decide takes the blame, I'm sure the accused have their tracks well covered and ready to blame the next guy.