Why did Dear shoot? We may never know.

Last updated on: November 29, 2015 at 7:06 pm by Jane the Actuary

Why did Dear shoot? We may never know. 2015-11-29T19:06:01-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Information is beginning to make its way around the internet about Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three in and around a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs on Friday. According to news reports, such as NBC News, he moved to Colorado last year from North Carolina, where he lived in a shack in the woods, unabomber-style, with no electricity or running water. The site reports,

James Russell, who lived near Dear in the North Carolina mountains, said if Dear did make conversation “nothing with him was very cognitive.”

and

two law enforcement officials told NBC News on Saturday that upon questioning, Dear made a comment about “no more baby parts” in an apparent reference to Planned Parenthood. The officials stressed that Dear’s comments were made amidst a flurry of “rantings” that also included statements about politics and President Barack Obama.

Planned Parenthood is, of course, using those four words to insist that Dear’s objective was to terrorize women at the clinic, and made evident a deep and enduring threat to women’s health. According to Reuters,

Planned Parenthood said on Sunday that news reports that the gunman who attacked its Colorado health clinic had uttered “no more baby parts” during his arrest showed that the suspect was motivated by an anti-abortion agenda.

The remark attributed to suspect Robert Lewis Dear was an apparent reference to Planned Parenthood’s abortion activities and its role in delivering fetal tissue to medical researchers, a hot button issue in the 2016 race for the presidency.

“We now know the man responsible for the tragic shooting at PP’s health center in Colorado was motivated by opposition to safe and legal abortion,” the organization said on Twitter.

Accordingly, they’re seeking to use this shooting to discredit abortion opponents, place the blame on them, and muzzling them, demanding that they cease voicing any objections to abortion.

Was Dear actually motivated by opposition to abortion? Initial reports are that the shooting started outside the clinic, at an intersection with a bank and other businesses. What set him off? Was there even an actual, identifiable cause?

Thinking about this let me to see what I could find in the way of news about the Chapel Hill shooter, from back in February. (FYI, I wrote about this here, about reports in general, and here, on Hick’s anger.) Remember? A perpetually-angry, never-successful middle-aged white man shot his three Muslim neighbors. Islamophobia-phobia kicked into high gear, though the officially-attributed motive was a parking-spot dispute.

That was back in February. Lots of speculation, then, well, nothing. There are virtually no updates out there on the internet, since the initial stories subsequent to the shooting. On April 6th, he was found eligible for the death penalty by a court ruling (see CNN, for instance). On May 6th, the Charlotte paper reported that the medical examiner’s autopsy report was released. On September 9, the local ABC station reported that the FBI had completed its report and forwarded it to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to determine whether hate crime charges were warranted. But that’s it. Perhaps this is just more evidence that the wheels of justice move too slowly; perhaps the desire to charge him with a hate crime has meant more bureaucracy getting in the way of starting the trial. Or perhaps this means that the news cycle has moved on. And that leaves me wondering if we’ll ever know what motivated Dear, or whether he was mentally sound enough to even meaningfully speak of “motivation” in the first place.

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