They really did a beautiful job with this monument. It's visually stunning in a city that rarely rises much past bleak. Thoughtful and simple, it memorializes the victims with barely a mention of the zealot who caused those deaths. Something really striking occurred to me about Timothy McVeigh and April 19, 1995. I remember the time vividly as my company, UUNET Technologies, was to go public the next month, and I might end up with a dollar or two.
After the attack, there was much discussion about which particular Islamic group or what particular Muslim fanatics could have done this?
Oddly enough, it turned out that the terrorist was a white, Christian, conservative, native born, US Army veteran male. Here's where I thought it got interesting. On 9/11, 19 idiots (mostly from Saudi Arabia and none from Iraq, nor with any connection to Iraq) came here and killed 2974 people. That's a kill rate of almost 157 people per terrorist. McVeigh killed 168.
So we can conclude that the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil per capita was carried out by a native-born, white, conservative, Christian, combat-tested male US Army veteran. I'm obviously not saying there's something wrong with all native-born, white, conservative, Christian, combat-tested male US Army veterans. I'm just saying be careful about the idea that we can profile by type because obviously not all terrorists reflect the outlook of those in other ways similar to them.
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