Making distinctions between two mass shootings

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

It was a week ago today that we heard the awful news that a man had entered a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Colo., and began shooting. It was a five-hour standoff. Three people died, including an off-duty police officer who was co-pastor of an evangelical church in Colorado Springs. The attacker reportedly said, “No more body parts”—a reference to a pro-life campaign highlighting the abortion giant’s involvement in the fetal tissue trade.

On Wednesday, two people killed 14 and wounded 21 in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. It was just a matter of hours before we learned they were Muslims.

I asked John Stonestreet whether we now are allowed to complain when almost every media source laid the Planned Parenthood attack at the feet of the pro-life movement.

He stressed the importance of looking at the facts and making distinctions between the two cases.

“The amount of violence from the pro-life cause has been unbelievably rare,” he said. “Considering the level of commitment and passion that pro-lifers bring to the pro-life movement, to have so few instances of violence … particularly in the last few decades, it’s hard to say then that this one shooter—who, by the way, has many, many marks of being really not in his right mind on almost any level—is representative of the pro-life movement.”

On the other hand, while not all Muslims are violent, history is rife with systematic expressions of violence in Islamic belief.

Stonestreet also noted we have little evidence of what level of commitment Robert Dear, the Planned Parenthood shooter, had to either Christianity or the pro-life movement. Despite claims from pro-abortion activists that Dear was influenced by the Planned Parenthood videos, his circumstances raise serious doubts about that.

“This guy had no electricity. How influenced could he have been by videos if he doesn’t have electricity in his home?” Stonestreet asked.

On the other hand, police found plenty of evidence of a systematic history of Dear using violence against things he didn’t like.

In San Bernardino, where the FBI has just launched a terror probe into the attack, we are learning how the attackers’ growing commitment to Islam led to radicalization.

“But we do need to make distinctions based on people,” Stonestreet cautioned. “That’s what we believe as Christians—that all people are made in the image and likeness of God. That’s their fundamental identity. So we cannot blanket with guilt an entire group of people. But at the same time, we can indicate and show how a growing commitment to Islam is something that has consequences.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on The World and Everything in It.