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You are here: Home / Featured / Colorado suffers terrorist attack. Cops, multiple civilians shot, three dead (updated).

Colorado suffers terrorist attack. Cops, multiple civilians shot, three dead (updated).

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Although this headline accurately describes what happened in Colorado mid-day on Friday, it’s doubtful that you will see the event described this way in United States news reports.

(5:30 pm Pacific) A University of Colorado at Colorado Springs police officer has died. Also, “CBS News justice correspondent Jeff Pegues reports that the gunman fired shots upon entering the building, which was guarded by security.”
(5:00 pm Pacific) There is still no formal statement of the shooter’s intent. However, the NYT reports:

Bryan Hawke, 35, a chiropractor who was holed up with six others in his one-story brick-fronted chiropractic office that is across the parking lot from Planned Parenthood said the center is the scene of near-daily protests.

“There are protests of varying sizes outside that building probably six days a week,” he said. Sometimes the protests attract as many as 200 people, but “most days there are a dozen people there.”

The United States Department of Defense defines terrorism thusly:

“the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”

That is what happened in Colorado Springs:

colorado springs shooting
Image from NYTimes

While we are quick to label acts of violence as “terrorist attacks” when they happen elsewhere, we shy away from using the label for internal actions. From a friend’s public post on Facebook:

We act as though white Christian terrorism doesn’t exist, and yet it does. It is precisely our reluctance to name it that lets it hide. When the Planned Parenthood in Pullman was burned to the ground this summer headlines did not refer to a terrorist organization’s latest attack. Nor, just a few days ago, were white supremacists shooting into a Black Lives Matter rally called terrorists in the news, yet those acts are the very definition of terrorism, each designed to intimidate law abiding citizens into complying with the terrorist’s political goals.

According to CBS:

As CBS News first reported in September, an FBI intelligence bulletin went out to law enforcement agencies nationwide [which] warned of “lone offenders using tactics of arsons and threats all of which are typical of the pro-life extremist movement.”

As another writer points out in a different TMV essay, James Dobson relocated his ultra-conservative Focus On The Family organization from southern California to Colorado Springs, turning the community into an “epicenter of evangelical faith and activism.”

Dobson, a vocal opponent of abortion, sued the federal government, claiming the Affordable Health Care Act contraception mandate “violates the religious beliefs of his Colorado Springs-based ministry, called Family Talk.” Jim Daly is currently president and CEO of Focus on the Family.

Look. Terrorism is predicated on achieving political goals through terror.

Radical Christians in America want to end all abortion.

And they, like many politicians, equate abortion with Planned Parenthood. Never mind the facts.

But even if 100% of PP’s services were abortion (which is not the case):

Legal abortion is a health-care service. It is a medical procedure. And if Planned Parenthood performs 100 percent of the abortions in this country, or if 100 percent of Planned Parenthood’s business is abortion, it means that they are filling a need. They are respecting people’s choice to terminate their pregnancies.

That’s why shootings at Planned Parenthood clinics are acts of terrorism, even if our media and politicians are too squeamish to be blunt. It’s the logical outgrowth of this:

abortion threats 2011
Data from guttmacher.org

These terrorists are winning.

Look at these headlines — including Reuters!

Google News, 1:22 pm, Pacific
Google News, 1:22 pm, Pacific

Google News, 7:02 pm, Pacific
Google News, 7:02 pm, Pacific

Is there anyone who truly believes that this woman’s health clinic provides only abortion services?

The number of places where a woman can get an abortion has been cut in half since 1980. In 1982, abortions were performed at 2,908 sites.

abortion providers US
Data from guttmacher.org

Which is a direct outgrowth of legal restrictions:

abortion restrictions
Data from guttmacher.org

Their argument is religious. As a medical procedure, abortion is safe. Safer than pregnancy.

abortion safety
Data from guttmacher.org

Yet America lags the world in maternal safety.

According to the CDC, “about 650 women die each year in the United States as a result of pregnancy or delivery complications.”

Data suggest there has been a reversal in maternal health and safety here. The United Nations ranked the United States 50th in the world for maternal mortality in a 2011 report. In 2015, we dropped to 61st in Save the Children’s 16th annual State of the World’s Mothers report. Our ranking here is below every other developed country.

These rankings are all the more deplorable when you acknowledge that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other country. And spends more on childbirth-related care ($86 billion a year, 2010) than any other area of hospitalization.

Who enables these terrorists?

What is an enabler? Someone who makes it easier for another person to continue a behavioral path.

These data from OpenSecrets show where anti-abortion groups are funneling campaign contributions: to Republicans.

Abortion policy by party
Data from OpenSecrets.org

Politicians and media may be squeamish. But angry citizens aren’t.

Words matter.

As professor George Lakoff has told us over and over, labels matter.

The only way media and politicians are going to label these acts of violence as acts of terror — instead of unrelated acts committed by lone, white, male Christians — is if they are pushed.

So push.

Tweet. Facebook. Write a letter to the editor. Call your legislators and congressmen.

Demand that we treat these types of violence as the acts of political terrorism that they are. Demand that we call out the enablers for what they are.

Act now, lest we become a harbinger of the world in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Posted: 2:53 pm, Pacific
Latest update: 10:33 pm, Pacific
Featured image: NY Times screen capture.