ALSO SEE: Republican Candidates Finally Comment on Shooting,
Continue False Attacks on Planned Parenthood

The Planned Parenthood Shooting and the Republican Candidates' Responses

By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

30 November 15

here are so many mass shootings in this country—in a school or a church, a movie theatre or a mall—and so little is expected of American politicians in regard to them that, in the two days since Robert Dear began firing his gun at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, the Republican Presidential contenders have largely been able to hide from the tragedy. At midday on Friday, Dear initiated a gun battle that lasted five hours and took the lives of three people, including a police officer, and wounded nine others. Dear’s motives, and his mental state, are not yet fully known. But, of all the places he could have walked into, he chose a Planned Parenthood clinic, and, of all the fragments of deranged rhetoric he could have repeated, he chose, according to the Times and other press reports, to say something about “no more baby parts.” This is a reference to the false charge that Planned Parenthood has illegally trafficked in the sale of fetal organs—and that is the mildest way of framing the allegations that anyone listening to a Republican debate or rally would likely have heard. The loudness of the slurs against the organization is in telling contrast to the cautious silence that descended when it became a target of gun violence.

Even basic expressions of sympathy were delayed; none of the major Republican candidates said anything specific until Saturday. Then, Ted Cruz tweeted, “Praying for the loved ones of those killed, those injured & first responders who bravely got the situation under control in Colorado Springs”—a sentence that makes the objects of Cruz’s sympathy somewhat obscure. In the September G.O.P. debate, Cruz called Planned Parenthood a “criminal enterprise,” guilty of “multiple felonies.” He has signed a letter saying that one of the group’s founders, Margaret Sanger, sought the “extermination” of black Americans. (She did not.) “When millions of Americans rose up against Planned Parenthood, I was proud to lead that fight,” Cruz said, in a debate in October.

Also on Saturday, Jeb Bush—after sending out cheerful tweets about college football and the items available at his campaign store—said, “There is no acceptable explanation for this violence, and I will continue to pray for those who have been impacted.” Those are words that demand nothing, including of himself. (Bush has called Planned Parenthood’s practices “horrifying,” and has said that the group is “not actually doing women’s health issues. They are involved in something way different than that.”) John Kasich also tweeted Saturday—also without specifically mentioning Planned Parenthood. Marco Rubio, who seized on the shooting of Cecil the lion as a reason to ask where the outrage was over Planned Parenthood and “dead babies,” didn’t have anything to say about the victims in Colorado. Neither did Chris Christie, who, in one debate, talked about Planned Parenthood engaging in “the systematic murder of children in the womb to preserve their body parts.” (Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders put out statements saying that they stood by Planned Parenthood; President Obama also issued a statement in which he reiterated, once again, his frustration with gun violence.)

On Sunday, it was harder for the candidates to hide: they wanted to appear on the various morning talk shows. Ben Carson, asked about the heated words leading up to the shooting, spread the blame to supporters of reproductive rights: “There is no question that hateful rhetoric, no matter which side it comes from, right or left, is something that is detrimental to our society.” Then he somehow connected that thought to the Islamic State. When John Dickerson pressed him to return to the subject of Colorado Springs, and whether abortion opponents should “tone down their rhetoric,” Carson said, “I think both sides should tone down their rhetoric and engage in civil discussion.”

The other approach on Sunday morning was to bury all discussion of responsibility in more loudness. One candidate is particularly adept at that. “I think it’s terrible. I mean, terrible. It’s more of the same. And I think it’s a terrible thing. And he’s a maniac! He’s a maniac,” Donald Trump said of the shooter on “Meet the Press,” when Chuck Todd brought up the incident. Todd, attempting to focus the bluster, asked, “Do you think the rhetoric got out of hand on Planned Parenthood?”

“No. I think he’s a sick person. And I think he was probably a person ready to go,” Trump said. When he added that Dear hadn’t yet made “a statement,” Todd mentioned the reporting about his comments on baby parts. And off went Trump: “Well, I will tell you there is a tremendous group of people that think it’s terrible, all of the videos that they’ve seen with some of these people from Planned Parenthood talking about it like you’re selling parts to a car. I mean, there are a lot of people that are very unhappy about that.” When Todd asked, again, if that unhappiness might lead to violence, Trump, after repeating that Dear was “mentally disturbed,” offered a couple of the self-reflective statements that he is prone to: “Well, there’s tremendous dislike. I can say that. Because I go to rallies. And I have by far, and you will admit that, I think, the biggest crowds, nobody even close”—here he paused for a tangent about how Sanders’s crowds were going “down, down, down like a rock”—“But I see a lot of anxiety and I see a lot of dislike for Planned Parenthood. There’s no question about that.” “Anxiety” may be the key word there in this election. The Trump vote—and he is the clear front-runner—clearly reflects a discontent that goes beyond the abortion issue. There is an unsettled antipathy that the G.O.P. establishment has fuelled without, it seems, fully understanding it.

Trump did grant that some of the discussion of sting videos purporting to demonstrate that Planned Parenthood was trafficking in organs was “not pertinent,” and that “I know that a couple of people that were running for office or are running for office on the Republican side were commenting on tapes that weren’t appropriate.” This reflected less a concession to reason, though, than his inability to pass up an opportunity to attack one of his opponents, Carly Fiorina. In a debate, Fiorina claimed that a video showed what sounded like infanticide—the killing of a “fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking”—for the stated sake of harvesting a marketable brain. This was false, and demonstrably so, but Fiorina just kept saying it. She was on television, on Sunday, too.

“This is so typical of the left to immediately begin demonizing the messenger because they don’t agree with your message,” Fiorina said on “Fox News Sunday,” when she was asked about concerns that the attacks on Planned Parenthood might have encouraged the violence. What is her “message,” though? Do the Republican candidates think that nobody is listening to them? Are they even listening to themselves?