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The odds are you remember the name Timothy McVeigh quite well. He was the mastermind behind the massive Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people and injured hundreds of others. Caught, tried, and executed by lethal injection.
How about the name Anthony Warner? Just three days ago, early Christmas morning, he drove a recreational vehicle filled with a massive supply of munitions into downtown Nashville and set off a gigantic bomb, likely as large, if not larger, than that detonated in Oklahoma City. Huge chunks of the downtown were destroyed by the explosion. Yet there were no fatalities—well, except for Mr. Warner, age 63–who apparently remained in the vehicle, purposely, when all hell broke loose.
While technically a suicide bombing (it was suicide, it was a bombing), we have no reason to believe it was an act of domestic terrorism. In fact, Mr. Warner is likely to be little more than a footnote in this year of tightly contested Presidential elections and deadly global pandemics. The networks will give the Nashville event third to fourth story coverage until a few more of the facts come out, but then, given a choice between the latest Trumpism and the rising cases and deaths from COVID, its air time will diminish quickly. And the newspapers, other than in Nashville and its environs, will pull it from the front page almost immediately and then let it quickly fall by the wayside.
If Mr. Warner’s goal was to be remembered, he has nobody to blame but himself because, apparently, the only life he wanted to take was his own. Still, I am fascinated by this event. While the details of his personal life and motives are slow to come out, how can one fail to be caught up by the contradictions in his actions. First, he had the know-how and dedication to amass what had to be a huge store of bomb material over what must have been a long time. Second, he had to have the know-how to construct a massive weapon of destruction. This was no kid’s toy he built. And though it may yet come out that online advice exists about how to construct such an abomination, this had to take all sorts of knowledge and resources, this had to be built painstakingly over time.
But then there’s the one set of details that makes this act different from all others that I have ever heard of. While he could he driven his RV into downtown Nashville at the height of rush hour and made Timothy McVeigh look like small potatoes, he chose to take his rusty old vehicle into Nashville at a time when he could be certain that almost no one would be there, early Christmas morning when people were at home opening presents. Okay, that was “nice” of him, but then—I can barely believe it—he played a clear recorded message on a loudspeaker from his RV warning people that the vehicle was going to explode in 15 minutes and urging them to leave the area for their safety.
“Anthony Warner,” announced the speaker at the USMBA Awards dinner, the annual meeting of the United States Mass Bomber Association, “to you we give this year’s award for Most Considerate Bomber.”
While this no-fatalities bombing may fade from national view quickly, there is an eerie undertone to it. How is it that one man could accrue such a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction without attracting the attention of local, state or federal watchdogs? And even though this troubled man chose to create a huge amount of collateral damage but no fatalities, who can say that others with considerably more nefarious motives might not attempt to turn Anthony Warner’s playbook into Timothy McVeigh’s?
2020 has been a terrible and quirky year. Anthony Warner, you have just put the cherry on the cake.
with a cherry bomb on top. . .