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So far it hasn't been established definitively that the gunman, a 57-year-old white man armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle, was motivated by hatred for abortion. But it seems probably. He started his rampage, in which he murdered 3 people, including a police officer, and wounded 9 others, in the Planned Parenthood parking lot, then retreated into the PP building and held off police for several hours, trapping people inside as hostages, until he ultimately surrendered. (He had probably run out of ammunition.)
But that's irrelevant, as the clinic obviously needed a permanent police presence to guard against anti-abortion vandals and terrorists. According to a neighbor, the clinic is harassed all year around by anti-abortion demonstrators, six days a week, ranging in number between a dozen and hundreds of agitators. If police had been on hand at the outset, the outcome would probably have been different.
Instead, clinics are forced to fend for themselves. This particular clinic had to invest in an armored safe room, and bullet-resistant vests in the room, for example.
Abortion providers- and suspected abortion providers, such as PP clinics that don't perform abortions- have been subjected to extreme harassment, thousands of acts of vandalism and sabotage, hundreds of arsons and bombings, and the murders of at least 9 people working at such clinics, ever since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which nominally legalized abortion in the U.S. Ever since, there has been a steal campaign to remove the right of women to decide whether to endure childbirth or not, aided and abetted oftentimes by the Supreme Court, which has allowed various reactionary state legislatures to enact laws that have gradually suffocated the ability of women to actually access abortions.
A clinic that is a permanent target of hostility, in an extreme right-wing locale, and given the decades-long history of anti-abortion terrorism in the U.S., logically should be under permanent police guard. Diplomatic missions in the U.S. are typically under police protection. Abortion clinics that are under assault and are in vulnerable locations obviously need such protection. (In the immediate aftermath of the murders at the Colorado Springs clinic, the New York City police put all abortion clinics in the city under guard.)
Domestic terrorist Robert Lewis Dear, shot 12 people he didn't know, murdering 3, at Planned Parenthood women's health clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Perhaps the fact that a policeman was killed will change the attitude of "the authorities" towards violent anti-abortion fanatics, who they (and the media) assiduously refuse to label terrorists, even though they fit the official definition to a T (politically motivated violence by non-state actors aimed at affecting policy or action).
But this isn't the first time an anti-abortion terrorist has murdered a police officer. Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed two abortion clinics, the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia, during the 1996 Summer Olympics being held there, and a lesbian bar for good measure (that'll teach women not to be homosexuals!), also murdered a policeman with one of his bombs. The cop was moonlighting as a security guard at one of the clinics Rudolph blew up, in which a nurse had her legs shredded by the shrapnel Rudolph thoughtfully packed into his bomb. What ensued was five years on the lam, during which time Rudolph was aided and abetted by sympathizers, one of whom regularly parked a pickup truck with food and supplies for Rudolph to take. The FBI and police took a hands-off approach to these criminal accomplices, unlike the grand jury inquisitions and mass persecutions they've directed at progressive communities suspected of helping revolutionary radicals. So I wouldn't bet on a change in attitude or practices by the FBI and various police and prosecutors.
The Federal government, despite Rudolph being a cop-killer, a category traditionally regarded as the lowest scum (along with "terrorists"), cut a deal with Rudolph, agreeing not to seek the death penalty for his crimes (two people died in his Olympics bombing also) in return for Rudolph telling them where he had stashed some explosives. (Contrast that with the State of Pennsylvania's relentless campaign to execute black journalist Mumia abu Jamal for apparently killing a cop in self-defense- the cop shot abu Jamal- a quest finally frustrated by a Federal court ruling. Now they are letting disease do the job of eliminating abu Jamal.)
The Federal government is supposed to enforce a clinic protection act enacted during the Clinton regime that criminalized acts of vandalism and sabotage against abortion clinics. But the FBI and Department of "Justice" is mostly indifferent to doing its duty in that regard. For example, the anti-abortion assassin who murdered Dr. George Tiller in Kansas in 2009, Scott Roeder, had been caught red-handed putting glue in the locks of Dr. Tiller's clinic by an employee of the clinic. When this Federal crime was reported to the local FBI office, the FBI agent there gave them the brush-off, telling them it was a local matter. (He knew full well the local district attorney was an anti-abortion zealot.) Tiller's clinic had been firebombed in 1986, and he was shot in both arms in 1993 by another anti-abortion terrorist. (Roeder, by the way, did not get the death penalty in death penalty state Kansas, despite shooting Tiller in the eye in church before a congregation during Sunday services.
Roeder vandalized the clinic both a week before and the day before murdering Dr. Tiller. But both the FBI and the local police refused to take action against this known terrorist.
I say "known" terrorist" before in the 1990's he belonged to a neo-fascist militia called the Montana Freemen. He was also a member of the so-called Sovereign Citizen Movement, which denies the legitimacy of all government in the U.S. and refuses to pay taxes or abide by various laws. (These fanatics are treated with kid gloves, unlike black militants, leftists, or Muslims who contest the legitimacy of American government.)
Roeder is a perfect example of how right-wing extremists are coddled in the U.S. Roeder was caught with a trunk full of explosives in 1996, and was sentenced to- probation. That's right. Something that any leftist, black, or Muslim would get decades in prison for, Roeder got not a day. Later, when he violated probation, he was jailed for just eight months, until the Kansas state Court of Appeals decided the search of his car had been illegal and suppressed the evidence. This despite the fact he had been driving without adriver's license, vehicle registration or proof of insurance. Much later, in 2009, after he murdered Dr. Tiller, Roeder's ex-wife admitted that his explosives were intended to blow up an abortion clinic.
Scott Roeder, terrorist given a green light by government.
So the coddling of this reactionary terrorist had lethal results thanks to the attitude of government officials, state and Federal, who are hostile to abortion, and have a general bias in favor of right-wingers. Throughout U.S. history, the mailed fist of the state has always come down hardest and with unrelenting determination against progressives and those considered "left," plus racial minorities.
The right-wing bias of U.S. media constitues part of the forces arrayed against progressives and protective of reactionaries. In regards to abortion in particular, the over-four-decades long campaign of harassment and violence against abortion clinics and their workers has passed with scant notice in U.S. corporate media. This means that effectively that media are accessories to the anti-abortionists, whom they insist on calling by the anti-abortionists own propaganda term, "pro-lifers."
The right of a person to control their own body is one of the most basic human rights imaginable. This right was wrested from the state in America only with great pressure, and the campaign to revoke it began immediately, with assistance from establishment power, both media and government. The struggle for abortion rights was part of the general uprising against American repression, which consisted of feminist struggle generally, black and Latino pushes against racist oppression, the beginnings of gay rights consciousness, challenges to suffocating sexual mores, experimentation with consciousness-expanding substances and pleasure seeking, and of course the anti-Vietnam war movement, ultimately the most worrying to the power elite. On all those fronts, there has been a determined effort by the power structure to retake lost ground. (Falsely claimed to be a "backlash," to obfuscate the malign hand of those in power.) The greatest successes have been in crushing black (and Hispanic) militancy and eliminating legal abortion entirely from over 90% of U.S. counties, where no doctor will perform an abortion. (Despite trying to brainwash teenagers with "abstinence" anti-sex "education," there has been less success in returning the population to 1950's sexual mores. Also in the past few years there has been sudden mass acceptance of gays, probably due largely to favorable portrayalof gay characters in the entertainment industry's output.)
Unfortunately, if people wanting to defend abortion took the battle to the enemy by assassinating anti-abortion leaders and instigators, or blowing up their offices, the full force of repressive state power would come down on them, with a wide-ranging pogrom against any and all "suspects." Thus the victims are handcuffed and left to plead and beg for protection from hostile "authorities" in many if not most U.S. jurisdictions.
The right to keep and bear arms and "stand your ground" only apply to white reactionaries.
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