ABSTRACT
Immediately after the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing, Americans asked themselves, Who could commit such a violent act? Were Arab terrorists to blame? Or had some other group committed this act? When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were apprehended, many Americans had their first glimpse of men who would go to extremes because of their political ideas. Words like militias and patriots became part of our vocabularies. And more and more we wanted to understand these men. Were McVeigh and Nichols monsters or sociopaths, were they simply insane, or were they normal? How could a normal person commit such a horrific act?
