Can you Gen-Xers answer my OKC bombing questions?

Answers from memory: *-Why the Murrah building? McVeigh was pissed off with the government, but there are many federal buildings.* Other people's answers are in line with my memory. McVeigh considered other targets. *-Why did McVeigh get the death penalty while Nichols got life in prison, Fortier 12 and now in the Witness Protection Program?* Nichols and Fortier testified against McVeigh in order to save their own butts. The Witness Protection Program is afforded those who can credibly claim threat to their well being for turning state's witness. That says something about the militancy of some in Fortier's circles. *-McVeigh was arrested shortly for driving without a license plate and having firearms. Was that just a stupid move or did he actually want to get caught?* Yes, McVeigh was being stupid. Apprehending him so quickly was a stroke dumb luck. *-Why were some people hoping it was a foreigner?* I don't think it was *hope* as much as it was an assumption, combined with a wish that the crime *not* be committed by an American (and an all-American white male vet , at that). The assumption part came from the first World Trade Center parking garage bombing, for which Ramzi Yousef and other Islamic radicals took credit. Also, there being a pretty long history of Arab-led terrorism and hijackings around the world going back through the 1970s, for many ordinary Americans this was the popular image of terrorism even before 9/11. The wish part came from Americans who just didn't want to reckon with increasingly radicalized right wing elements within the US. *-How did this change safety in America? I remember everything being the same, unlike after 9/11.* I think for government buildings and government workers, there was a pronounced shift in safety and security practices. I recall some government buildings around where I lived (Minnesota and Wisconsin) enlarging their no-parking perimeters. *-I heard this was a defining even in history for Gen-X like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Challenger. Do you agree?* I don't agree. The Challenger disaster was defining because our generation's age--many of us were in middle school and high school, so the Challenger was our first exposure to a national disaster just as we were coming of age, paying attention to what was going on in the world. Also, for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of GenXers, it happened in real time--kids in school watching the lift off live on television during the school day. The events of 1989--first Tiananmen Square and then the fall of Berlin Wall--loom large, as well. Those were the first events of true global significance that we lived through, knowing that the world was changing just as we were stepping through the portal into adulthood. By 1995, the year of the OKC bombing, most of us had already become somewhat inured to the shock of televised spectacles. Rodney King, the Waco debacle, the OJ car chase... all of those events generated wall-to-wall, endlessly repeated televised images in the years prior, along with the rise throughout the late 80s and all of the 90s of reality TV, daily doses of people confessing, fighting, tearfully re-uniting, etc etc on TV. On a profound political level, we probably can and *should* date a turn in the society to the OKC bombing. McVeigh and his associates represented a formerly fringe wing of conservative America that has since ascended to dominate the GOP. Jan 6 was in some ways a continuation of the hatred of the federal government expressed by McVeigh, which itself through the *Turner Diaries* and assorted right wing nativist mythologies can be traced back to Reconstruction and the perpetual sore loser mentality of the defeated Confederacy. Good questions!