Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee called Friday’s shootings at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs an “act of terrorism” on CNN’s “State of the Union“.
“What he did is domestic terrorism, and what he did is absolutely abominable, especially to us in the pro-life movement, because there’s nothing about any of us that would condone or in any way look the other way on something like this,” Huckabee said to interviewer Brianna Keilar. Police identified the attacker as 57-year-old Robert Lewis Dear.
The former Arkansas governor is one of the few GOP candidates to make a statement about the shootings, which left at least nine injured and three dead, including a police officer. Huckabee is a devout Evangelical Christian minister who has made his opposition to abortion a large part of his campaign.
Huckabee said pro-life advocates would not condone the killings no matter the motivation.
“There’s no legitimizing, there’s no rationalizing,” Huckabee said. “It was mass murder. It was absolutely unfathomable. And there’s no excuse for killing other people, whether it’s happening inside the Planned Parenthood headquarters, inside their clinics where many millions of babies die, or whether it’s people attacking Planned Parenthood.”
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Write to Julia Zorthian at julia.zorthian@time.com