In his senior year he was named "most promising computer programmer" of Starpoint Central High School (as well as "Most Talkative" by his classmates as a joke as he did not speak much)[20][21] but had relatively poor grades until his 1986 graduation.

He became intensely interested in gun rights as well as the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution after he graduated from high school and read magazines such as Soldier of Fortune.

[33] McVeigh also wrote to Representative John J. LaFalce (D–New York),[34] complaining about the arrest of a woman for carrying mace: It is a lie if we tell ourselves that the police can protect us everywhere at all times.

[40][41] For the five months following the Waco siege, McVeigh worked at gun shows and handed out free cards printed with the name and address of Lon Horiuchi, an FBI sniper, "in the hope that somebody in the Patriot movement would assassinate the sharpshooter."

Horiuchi's actions while an FBI agent have drawn controversy, specifically his shooting and killing of Randy Weaver's wife while she held an infant child.

Though he remained skeptical of some of the most extreme ideas being bandied around, he liked talking to people there about the United Nations, the federal government, and possible threats to American liberty.

[44]McVeigh had a road atlas with hand-drawn designations of the most likely places for nuclear attacks and considered buying property in Seligman, Arizona, which he determined to be in a "nuclear-free zone."

In between watching coverage of the Waco siege on TV, Nichols and his brother began teaching McVeigh how to make explosives by combining household chemicals in plastic jugs.

He visited Area 51 in order to defy government restrictions on photography and went to Gulfport, Mississippi, to determine the veracity of rumors about United Nations operations.

Around this time, McVeigh and Nichols began making bulk purchases of ammonium nitrate, an agricultural fertilizer, for resale to survivalists, since rumors were circulating that the government was preparing to ban it.

He denounced government officials as "fascist tyrants" and "storm troopers," and warned: ATF, all you tyrannical mother fuckers will swing in the wind one day for your treasonous actions against the Constitution of the United States.

"[55] McVeigh later said he considered "a campaign of individual assassination," with "eligible" targets including Attorney General Janet Reno, Judge Walter S. Smith Jr. of Federal District Court, who handled the Branch Davidian trial; and Lon Horiuchi, a member of the FBI hostage-rescue team, who shot and killed Vicki Weaver in a standoff at a remote cabin at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992.

After the bombing, he was ambivalent about his act and the deaths he caused; as he said in letters to his hometown newspaper, he sometimes wished that he had carried out a series of assassinations against police and government officials instead.

[60] Working at a lakeside campground near McVeigh's old Army post, he and Nichols constructed an ANFO explosive device mounted in the back of a rented Ryder truck.

On April 19, 1995, McVeigh drove the truck to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building just as its offices opened for the day.

In reference to theories that McVeigh had assistance from others, he responded with a well-known line from the film A Few Good Men, "You can't handle the truth!"

[68][69] Shortly after the bombing, while driving on Interstate 35 in Noble County, near Perry, Oklahoma, McVeigh was stopped by State Trooper Charles J.

Oklahoma City District Attorney Bob Macy said he would file state charges in the other 160 murders after McVeigh's co-defendant, Terry Nichols, was tried.

"[87] He said that if there turned out to be an afterlife, he would "improvise, adapt and overcome",[87] noting: "If there is a hell, then I'll be in good company with a lot of fighter pilots who also had to bomb innocents to win the war.

[92] Six days prior to his scheduled execution, the FBI turned over thousands of documents of evidence it had previously withheld to McVeigh's attorneys.

[101] On November 21, 1997, President Bill Clinton had signed S. 923, special legislation introduced by Senator Arlen Specter to bar McVeigh and other veterans convicted of capital crimes from being buried in any military cemetery.

"[12] McVeigh had written that he considered having them dropped at the site of the memorial where the building once stood, but decided that would be "too vengeful, too raw, too cold.

[60] Psychiatrist John Smith concluded that McVeigh was "a decent person who had allowed rage to build up inside him to the point that he had lashed out in one terrible, violent act.

While there, he was interviewed by student reporter Michelle Rauch, a senior journalism major at Southern Methodist University who was writing for the school paper.

[119] In a 1,200-word essay[1] dated March 1998, from the federal maximum-security prison at Florence, Colorado, McVeigh claimed that the terrorist bombing was "morally equivalent" to U.S. military actions against Iraq and other foreign countries.

The handwritten essay, submitted to and published by the alternative national news magazine Media Bypass, was distributed worldwide by the Associated Press on May 29, 1998.

On April 26, 2001, McVeigh wrote a letter to Fox News, "I Explain Herein Why I Bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City", which explicitly laid out his reasons for the attack.

[120] McVeigh read the novel Unintended Consequences (1996), and said that if it had come out a few years earlier, he would have given serious consideration to using sniper attacks in a war of attrition against the government instead of bombing a federal building.

[121] McVeigh's accomplice Terry Nichols was convicted and sentenced in federal court to life in prison for his role in the crime.

[123] Several residents of central Kansas, including real estate agent Georgia Rucker and a retired Army NCO, testified at Terry Nichols' federal trial that they had seen two trucks at Geary Lake State Park, where prosecutors alleged the bomb was assembled.