When a reporter told Cruz that the suspect reportedly said "no more baby parts" upon his arrest--echoing Republican rhetoric after undercover videos this summer showed Planned Parenthood officials discussing the cost of fetal tissue for medical research--Cruz responded: "Well, it's also reported that he was registered as an independent and as a woman and a transgendered leftist activist, if that's what he is."

Whatever his motivation, he slipped through the cracks. America is so worried about ISIS, it pays scant attention to the problem of the lone and looney wolves at home.

It is an easy way out for politicians who are clueless about how to deal with problems at home to create even more dangerous situations abroad, and then pretend to be engaged in solving them.

Regarding Dear's motivation:
What he is reported to have said about his rationale, "no more body parts", sounds like an echo of what Carly Florina put out there during the "debates".

COLORADO SPRINGS -- The gunman suspected of storming a Planned Parenthood clinic and killing a police officer and two others used the phrase "no more baby parts'' to explain his actions, according to a law enforcement official, a comment likely to further inflame the heated rhetoric surrounding abortion.
Link

That it apparently never occurred to law enforcement and other public officials that this was bound to happen -- or that they could foresee it but lacked the guts to say so and provide real protection (not the usual sort; as a clinic defender, I can attest that cops on the scene can act to encourage clinic attackers) -- is stunning to me.

I await identifications to come tomorrow of the others killed at the clinic -- as we know that they were not staff there -- may bring more amazing revelations to law enforcement, other officials, and media. One may be another male, as a patient there for a pregnancy checkup still has not heard from the father of their future child, who had accompanied her to the clinic. (Perhaps those in the waiting area did not get to the clinic's safe room.) It was fine to kill male "abortion providers," as well as wimmen who would be "baby killers" -- but that prospective fathers and cops could be killed is different, it seems.

What was Dear's motivation? Even though no one knows as of now, that hasn't stopped every activist group from claiming to be his victim. The gun control crowd harps on his use of a gun. The Attorney General has already declared he was at war with women. Pro-choice activists say he was motivated by hatred of abortion.

His motivation isn't relevant to the discussion of what the use of his gun suggests in terms of any public policy decisions one might make related to his attack, so it's not clear why you would include that in your list of people making claims about the incident before the facts necessary to make sense of it are available.

She acknowledged on Saturday that she had once called the police about him but declined to talk about it. A police incident report shows that in 1997 she told the police that he had locked her out of her home, and had "hit her and pushed her out the window" when she tried to climb in. He also shoved her to the ground. The report said she did not want to file any charges, but simply "wanted something on record of this incident occurring."
...
The younger Mr. Dear was raised in the Baptist church, Ms. Ross said. He was religious but not a regular churchgoer, not one to harp on his faith. "He believed wholeheartedly in the Bible. That's what he always said, he read it cover to cover to cover," she said. But he wasn't fixated on it, she added.

He was generally conservative, but not obsessed with politics. ....He believed that abortion was wrong, but it was not something that he spoke about compulsively. "It was never really a topic of discussion," Ms. Ross said. He did not have many close friends.

And yet somehow, we're allowing an otherwise undue risk of bodily harm and even loss of life to be incurred by those women who choose to abort a pregnancy, and by medical personnel who facilitate the availability of the abortion procedure, which is occurring with an intolerable frequency at the violent hands of outside agitators and extremists.

The right to free speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution does not also include a right to resort to intimidation, as a means to obtaining one's desired objectives and results. Any arguments offered to the contrary are not based upon bedrock constitutional principle, but are instead motivated by the immediate expediency of a given moment.

For what good is a law, really, if it serves to render our society collectively impotent and powerless to act in the face of a clear and present threat to the health, safety, and well being of either its individual members or entire classes of people, as that threat is posed by a specific and identifiable individual and / or faction?

How does it benefit either the injured or the deceased to apply that law ex post facto, once the violent deed is done and people have been maimed and / or killed as a result?

Therefore, at what point should the law be able to hold to account those individuals and groups on the political right -- or left, as the case may be -- for their incendiary, volatile and hatemongering rhetoric to that effect?

(France, which actually has laws specifically addressing the use of hate speech, has also been grappling with the same question, both in the wake of last January's violent attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher market in Paris which left 17 people dead, and this month's terrorist attacks which killed 130.)

We shouldn't be willing to wait until pro-choice individuals finally feel compelled to defend themselves, by responding in kind to the bodily threats and actual acts of violence presently being visited upon them by the political right, before finally acting to stop this insanity.

If anyone is yelling, "fire" in a crowded theatre, it is she - using inflamed rhetoric about Planned Parenthood allegedly selling aborted babies and their body parts. and setting off and psychically enabling unstable freaks who have unfettered access to guns.

christinep wrote:

"The situation in Colorado Springs could reasonably have been said to be near powder-keg in terms of emotional political issues."

Donald writes:

We shouldn't be willing to wait until pro-choice individuals finally feel compelled to defend themselves, by responding in kind to the bodily threats and actual acts of violence presently being visited upon them by the political right, before finally acting to stop this insanity.