Colorado Springs, Colorado — True to form, President Obama once again saw the opportunity to promote his anti-gun agenda, this time following the shooting spree at the Planned Parenthood facility on Friday, declaring:
Enough is enough. This is not normal. We can’t let it become normal.
[If Americans] truly care … then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them.
The last thing Americans should have to do … is comfort the families of people killed by gun violence … and yet, two days after Thanksgiving, that’s what we are forced to do again.
The president admitted that he didn’t know what motivated Robert Lewis Dear, the 57-year-old suspect from North Carolina, to enter the facility on Friday morning and start shooting. He didn’t know why he fired on Ozy Licano, who was leaving the clinic’s parking lot and narrowly escaped serious injury when two rounds punched holes in his windshield as he was trying to escape. He didn’t know why Dear holed up in the clinic for hours, engaging in an off-and-on gun battle with police. He didn’t know why he shot and killed a member of the University of Colorado Springs police department who, along with dozens of other officers, drove to the scene to help neutralize the attacker. He didn’t know why Dear apparently shot and killed two victims inside the clinic while wounding nine more. He didn’t know why Dear decided, after five hours, to give himself up to the police to end the siege. He didn’t know what may have been in some satchels that Dear left behind at the scene.
But he knew what was at fault: “[Dear] opened fire with an assault weapon [that] forced fear upon … more Americans and their families.”
Mainstream media such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal also didn’t know what motivated Dear to launch his attack, but they were full of conjecture. Wrote Times’ journalists Julie Turkewitz and Jack Healy:
Officials from both law enforcement and Planned Parenthood said they did not know whether the group’s Colorado Springs center had been specifically targeted.
But the attack carried echoes of other violent assaults on abortion providers…
Since abortion became legal … many abortion clinics and staff members across the country have been subjected to harassment including death and bomb threats, and hundreds of acts of violence including arson, bombings and assaults and eight murders, according to figures compiled by Naral Pro-Choice America Foundation.
The Wall Street Journal was only slightly less certain that Dear’s attack was motivated by hatred for abortion:
The motive for the assault, and whether the clinic was the target, was unclear. Abortion clinics have been targets of bombings in the past.
Dear’s attack might have been motivated by revelations that Planned Parenthood was selling baby parts for profit:
In recent months protesters have gathered outside clinics after undercover video from a pro-life group showed a Planned Parenthood official discussing reimbursements for supplying fetal tissue for medical research.
Planned Parenthood’s regional director Vicki Cowart knew what no one else knew: The attack was motivated by terrorists and extremists:
We don’t yet know the full circumstances and motives behind this criminal action, and we don’t yet know if Planned Parenthood was in fact the target of this attack.
[But] we share the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country.
We will never back away from providing care in a safe, supportive environment that millions of people rely on and trust.
The Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs conducts abortions on Mondays and Tuesdays, and counseling and advice the other days of the week. At the time of Friday’s attack there were an estimated 50 “advisors” providing counselling to about 100 customers.
On Friday most of them escaped with their lives.
On Mondays and Tuesdays, however, unborn babies entering the facility do not leave alive. Commentary from the mainstream media and the president ignored that tragedy altogether, preferring to focus instead on their own agendas.
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
