Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Terrorist Attack Anom

Anomie and Alienation and Timothy McVeigh

The Oklahoma City terrorist bombing on April 19, 1995, represents a seminal event in recent American history; together with the earlier bombing of New York's World Trace center, Oklahoma City demonstrated to Americans that as a people, we are not exempt from terrorist attacks. The purpose of this essay is to examine the activities and attitudes of Timothy McVeigh, the man found guilty of planning and executing the Oklahoma City attack, from the perspective of sociological theory. McVeigh's life and his behavior lend themselves to such an analysis, particularly with regard to the theory of anomie as described by, among others, Robert Merton (1957). McVeigh has been characterized by reporters, criminologists, and others as having live a life of solitude, obsession, and anger (Jones, 1998; McFadden, 1995; Serrano, 1998; Stickney, 1996) -- conditions and attitudes closely associated with Merton's (1957) attribution of traits associated with alienated individuals and groups.

Anomie, according to Merton (1957), holds that groups lacking legitimate means to success or perceiving institutional and social barriers to their success, will have higher rates of deviance than other groups. Deviance is constructed as an adaptation to strain. Merton (1957) posited the existence of five modes of individual adaptation: conformity, ritualism, innovation, retreatism, and rebellion. Of the three

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major impetus for his later acts of anti-government terrorism. In addition, it was during the final months of his military service that McVeigh began to express public dislike of the United States government (Stickney, 1996). McVeigh was particularly angry with government efforts to limit the rights of citizens to bear arms and also appears to have been extremely vocal on the subject of Second Amendment rights and the government's interference in the exercise of those rights (Jones, 1998). Serrano (1998) draws upon interviews of others who served with McVeigh in the United States and during duty in the Persian Gulf War to assert that McVeigh's conversations tended to focus on the failure of government to support the rights of mainstream Americans. Serrano (1998, p. 49) quotes Carl Lebron, a soldier with whom McVeigh served in the Persian Gulf, who stated McVeigh's conversations dealt mostly with "politics, secret societies, religion and conspiracy theories." Further, this peer told Serrano (1998) that McVeigh felt that the federal government had too much power and that federal law enforcement officers had become too involved in illegal police activities directed against "real Americans." What emerges from the biograph
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Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)