On Nov. 27, Robert Lewis Dear walked into a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic and opened fire with a long gun, beginning a five-hour stand-off with the police. Nine people, including four police officers, were injured. Three people — a police officer, a military veteran and a single mother who was accompanying a friend — were killed. Dear surrendered to the police and was taken into custody alive after committing the worst attack on an abortion provider since late-term abortion provider George Tiller’s murder in 2009. When he was taken into custody, Dear reportedly told a police officer, “No more baby parts,” a reference to a series of doctored videos released by the Center for Medical Progress, an extremist anti-choice group that pretended to be a medical research group and tried to claim that Planned Parenthood traffics the body parts of aborted fetuses. Dear also had a history of vandalizing other Planned Parenthood clinics and of violence against women, including domestic abuse, voyeurism and sexual assault.

The FBI considers domestic terrorism to be any violent act that is intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population and is motivated by political or religious beliefs. Dear committed a violent act with the intent of intimidating or coercing a civilian population and was motivated by his political beliefs. So, by the FBI definition, a reasonable person would conclude that this attack in Colorado Springs, a politically motivated violent act for the purpose of targeting a civilian population, is an act of domestic terrorism. Even former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee would agree with that statement, as he stated in a tweet he posted a few days after the shooting.

But, as is the case after every mass shooting or act of violence carried out by a white man, the first question wasn’t if this attack was an act of terrorism (it is) but a discussion about mental illness and access to guns. I’ve written about the issue of mental illness and gun violence twice in the past, and both times, I have argued that conflating mental illness with mass violence is at best inaccurate and at worst harmful to the twenty percent of Americans who have  mental disorders, just like I do. There is a double standard here as well ― that white Christian men can commit atrocities motivated by their religious and political beliefs and are not labeled as terrorists, just mentally ill, even when they, in fact, are not.

There are no indications that Dear was mentally ill or motivated by mental illness. In fact, the vast majority of those who attack clinics and doctors are not mentally ill. Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Olympics bomber who bombed two abortion clinics and killed a clinic security guard in 1998, was not motivated by mental illness. Paul Jennings Hill, who shot and killed an abortion provider and his bodyguard in 1994, was not motivated by mental illness. James Charles Kopp, who followed a provider home and shot him through a kitchen window, sniper-style, was not motivated by mental illness. Scott Roeder, who followed George Tiller into a church and then shot him point-blank in the head, was not motivated by mental illness. Only John Salvi, who may have had schizophrenia, murdered two Planned Parenthood employees in Brookline in 1994; the court ruled that he was competent to stand trial, and Salvi ended up committing suicide in prison.

And this trend goes beyond anti-abortion violence. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, was not motivated by mental illness. Wade Michael Page, a white supremacist and neo-Nazi who murdered six people at a Sikh temple in 2012, was not motivated by mental illness. Dylann Roof, the most recent white domestic terrorist who was not labelled as such, was not motivated by mental illness.

To say these domestic terrorists are mentally ill or that mental illness “drove them” to commit these atrocities is inaccurate on two fronts. It reinforces the idea that all mentally ill people are violent and are controlled by their mental illness, which only leads to taboos against speaking about mental illness or even getting help. In fact, the Department of Health and Human Services found that only five percent of violent crimes are committed by mentally ill people while people with mental illness are 10 times more likely to experience violence than the general population. But, more troubling, it ignores the motivations of these anti-abortion murderers.

Robert Lewis Dear clearly was motivated by violent anti-abortion rhetoric. He had a history of violence against women — an ex-wife, Barbara Michaux, called the police on him in 1993 after he beat her, and a woman who worked at a local mall accused him of sexually assaulting her at knifepoint after she turned him down in 1992. Michaux told NBC News that she had “no doubt in my [her] mind” that Dear was motivated by anti-abortion rhetoric when he committed his act of terror.

This trend is not unusual. Hill, Kopp, Salvi and Roeder all had histories of radical anti-abortion activism before they committed murder. In fact, Roeder put glue in the locks of a clinic’s doors the day before he brutally murdered George Tiller. Hill was affiliated with the militant Army of God, an anti-abortion group labeled as a terrorist organization by the FBI. Salvi was also loosely affiliated with the Army of God, a Christian anti-abortion group that condones terrorist activity. Kopp was part of the Christian terrorist group the Lambs of Christ. Roeder had met with Army of God members and was closely tied to Operation Rescue, a militant anti-abortion group whose leader, Troy Newman, has justified the murder of abortion providers as self-defense. 

Dear himself seems to have been a supporter of David Daleiden, the head of CMP, the very group that first made the inflammatory claims that Planned Parenthood sells baby body parts. As an aside, violence and threats against Planned Parenthood clinics have escalated since the release of CMP’s deceptively edited and possibly illegally obtained videos, and there were nine criminal or suspicious incidents on Planned Parenthood-affiliated clinics from late July, when the videos came out, through early September, when the FBI released a report on an uptick in anti-abortion attacks. Daleiden and his supporters — including presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, who told outright lies about the doctored Planned Parenthood videos during the first Republican debate — cannot and should not be held responsible for this terrorist attack;  they should be held responsible for their rhetoric and its consequences, just as how Troy Newman should be held responsible for calling for the execution of abortion providers.

What happened in Colorado Springs was an act of terrorism. It was not caused by mental illness and it did not happen in a vacuum. Until we, as a nation, come to terms with this and label these atrocities as what they are and hold those who directly encourage this violence accountable, I do not think that these attacks against Planned Parenthood, abortion clinics and the doctors who put their lives on the line to help protect a constitutional right will end.