I think essentiallly we're in agreement here, troll. I get concerned at the tendency people have to assume that the responsibility for the harm that individuals do stop with that individual, and that if we try to find out if there were things about society that fed into that person's actions, that's just a matter of making excuses.

And the reason that matters is that it's only by finding out those kind of things that we can make it less likely that it'll all happen over again.

So far as I can see Timothy McVeigh was an ordinary enough young man from an ordinary enough background. Somewhere along the line he turned into someone capable of that bombing, and of shrugging of the results withn the kind of detached dehumanised language that army press officers use - "collateral damage". So what happened?

Incidentally Here is a piece about it all by a namesake of his, a Scottish journalist called Tracey McVeigh