More details emerge abut Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Dear.

Courtesy of The New York Times:  

On Friday, according to officials, Mr. Dear entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people and wounding nine others with a semiautomatic rifle. The attack, which ended with his surrender to the police after a harrowing nationally televised standoff in the snow-dusted Western city, was a brutally violent and very public chapter in a life story whose details are not fully known. 

But in court documents and interviews with people who knew Mr. Dear well, a picture emerges of an angry and occasionally violent man who seemed deeply disturbed and deeply contradictory: He was a man of religious conviction who sinned openly, a man who craved both extreme solitude and near-constant female company, a man who successfully wooed women but, some of them say, also abused them. He frequented marijuana websites, then argued with other posters, often through heated religious screeds. 

“Turn to JESUS or burn in hell,” he wrote on one site on Oct. 7, 2005. “WAKE UP SINNERS U CANT SAVE YOURSELF U WILL DIE AN WORMS SHALL EAT YOUR FLESH, NOW YOUR SOUL IS GOING SOMEWHERE.” 

A number of people who knew Mr. Dear said he was a staunch abortion opponent. Ms. Micheau, 60, said in a brief interview Tuesday that late in her marriage to Mr. Dear, he told her that he had put glue in the locks of a Planned Parenthood location in Charleston. “He was very proud of himself that he’d gone over and jammed up their locks with glue so that they couldn’t get in,” she said. 

One person who spoke with him extensively about his religious views said Mr. Dear, who is 57, had praised people who attacked abortion providers, saying they were doing “God’s work.” In 2009, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for the privacy of the family, Mr. Dear described as “heroes” members of the Army of God, a loosely organized group of anti-abortion extremists that has claimed responsibility for a number of killings and bombings.

Of course the investigation is still ongoing, and currently the Colorado Springs police are keeping mum, but there is already a rather stark picture emerging of Mr. Dear, and his potential motivations.

And that was enough for one activist group in Colorado to move to hold certain politicians accountable: 

At a gathering of reporters at the Colorado State Capitol Tuesday, Amy Runyon-Harms, director of ProgressNow Colorado, said: “It’s time to name names. It’s time to call out and stop this dangerous campaign of lies from right-wing politicians before more lives are lost.” 

Runyon-Harms asked three Colorado politicians to apologize for their “extreme” anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric, which, she said, played a role in inciting a man to kill three people Friday at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. 

“It must stop, and stop now,” Runyon-Harms said. “We call on right-wing politicians across the state and nation to stop their false attacks on Planned Parenthood, and apologize for lies that are directly contributing to politically motivated violence in America today.” 

The three elected officials, all Republicans, spotlighted at Tuesday’s news conference were U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, state Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt (R-Colorado Springs), and state Sen. Tim Neville, who represents a West Denver suburb and is running for U.S. Senate.

Of course this is what the conservatives have feared would happen all along, and it certainly looks like this tragedy is going to cause them quite a number of problems moving forward.

It is just too bad that innocent people had to die before people woke up to the fact that this anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric was not simply harmless propaganda.