President Obama is once again responding to a mass shooting with calls for increased gun control. “This is not normal. We can’t let it become normal,” Obama said in a statement. “If we truly care about this—if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience—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. Period. Enough is Enough.”
Obama released his call for more gun control a day after a shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs killed three people, including one police officer. The Colorado Springs Police Department confirmed on Saturday morning that the gunman was Robert Lewis Dear, 57, of North Carolina. He is being held behind bars without a bond until a court appearance Monday, according to ABC News. Jail records did not list charges against Dear.
Dear apparently surrendered to police after he realized he was cornered and had nowhere to go, reports CBS News. He is now reportedly cooperating with law enforcement.
Police have released little information about Dear beyond his name so the motive for the shooting remains far from clear. Although Planned Parenthood recognized there is still a lot of information missing, it also did not hesitate to draw a link between anti-abortion rhetoric and terrorist action against reproductive health centers. “We share the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country,” Planned Parenthood said in a statement.
Dear spent some of his time in a North Carolina cabin with no electricity or running water. His neighbors say he wasn’t very talkative and when he did speak it didn’t quite seem like he was fully there. “If you talked to him, nothing with him was very cognitive—topics all over place,” James Russell tells the Associated Press.
