I was just reading this review of a book about mcveigh at salon.com and I found some quotes that express some of my ideas better than I can.
"A gun is pure power. Life? Click. Death. Firing a gun allows the participant to wield more power than almost anyone does in the ordinary course of events: This power is exhilarating and seductive. For some people, wielding that amount of power is terrifying: like a tear in the fabric of reality. Most nations have enshrined this attitude as their national policy towards guns. But in the United States, with its mythology of the frontier and the armed militiaman, the national attitude is different. There is a very large group of Americans who like the power of guns, but learn to control that power and treat it with respect. This group includes most law-abiding gun owners. "
"But there is another, more disturbing group. For those with paranoid, insecure, authoritarian temperaments, the power of the gun ties in with, or allows them to construct, a monstrous, Ayn Randian, cartoon-like vision of personal freedom -- a Wild West landscape of the soul, a pre-Revolutionary utopia where one's every desire is gratified, where stout yeomen carve out their own destinies, free from interference from parents or Uncle Sam. But this infantile, infinitely expansive, id-like fantasy clashes with the fact that the dreamer lives in society, a society of laws and government and parents. And so these gun-worshipping dreamers build up an equally monstrous vision of coercive governmental power -- an Evil Empire. And every now and then, one of those dreamers acts. "
"It is a familiar type. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Americans who hold beliefs identical to McVeigh's. He is a prototypical extreme-right zealot: He hates and fears the federal government, worships guns, fetishizes "liberty" (defined in almost purely negative terms, as freedom from external interference of any kind), embraces survivalism and sees himself as having acted in a proud American tradition of resistance to tyranny that goes back to the Founders. Throw in belief in the gold standard, certainty that a U.N.-run "New World Order" is poised to take over the world, racial resentment and an obsessive fixation on Ruby Ridge and Waco as proof that federal agents are jackbooted thugs waiting to make their final move, and the all-too-familiar portrait is complete. "
"A gun is pure power. Life? Click. Death. Firing a gun allows the participant to wield more power than almost anyone does in the ordinary course of events: This power is exhilarating and seductive. For some people, wielding that amount of power is terrifying: like a tear in the fabric of reality. Most nations have enshrined this attitude as their national policy towards guns. But in the United States, with its mythology of the frontier and the armed militiaman, the national attitude is different. There is a very large group of Americans who like the power of guns, but learn to control that power and treat it with respect. This group includes most law-abiding gun owners. "
"But there is another, more disturbing group. For those with paranoid, insecure, authoritarian temperaments, the power of the gun ties in with, or allows them to construct, a monstrous, Ayn Randian, cartoon-like vision of personal freedom -- a Wild West landscape of the soul, a pre-Revolutionary utopia where one's every desire is gratified, where stout yeomen carve out their own destinies, free from interference from parents or Uncle Sam. But this infantile, infinitely expansive, id-like fantasy clashes with the fact that the dreamer lives in society, a society of laws and government and parents. And so these gun-worshipping dreamers build up an equally monstrous vision of coercive governmental power -- an Evil Empire. And every now and then, one of those dreamers acts. "
"It is a familiar type. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Americans who hold beliefs identical to McVeigh's. He is a prototypical extreme-right zealot: He hates and fears the federal government, worships guns, fetishizes "liberty" (defined in almost purely negative terms, as freedom from external interference of any kind), embraces survivalism and sees himself as having acted in a proud American tradition of resistance to tyranny that goes back to the Founders. Throw in belief in the gold standard, certainty that a U.N.-run "New World Order" is poised to take over the world, racial resentment and an obsessive fixation on Ruby Ridge and Waco as proof that federal agents are jackbooted thugs waiting to make their final move, and the all-too-familiar portrait is complete. "
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