January 14, 2016 01:00 PM UTC

"I picked Planned Parenthood because it’s murdering little babies.”

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• by: Jason Salzman

During his first media interview since allegedly killing three people at a Planned Parenthod clinic in Colorado Springs, Robert Dear said:

“I felt like they were going to get me, and so I am going to pick where I want to make my last stand. And I picked Planned Parenthood because it’s murdering little babies.”

Dear also told KCNC-TV’s Rick Sallinger that the FBI has been tracking him for 22 years and that agents told police at the scene that he was armed. There’s no evidence that the FBI has ever tracked Dear.

Setting himself up for a shot at an insanity defense, Dear also told Sallinger he made a “spur of the moment” decision to commit the act of terror.

“It wasn’t planned, as far as that goes. It was just a spur of the moment that… okay. They wanted, they wanted to slay, to come for me, they wanted to start a war, and so that’s why I did it,” said Dear.

A couple days before Dear called Sallinger from jail, Colorado State Senate President Bill Cadman told Colorado Public Radio that Republicans will continue investigating Planned Parenthood during the upcoming legislative session. As I reported in a longer piece for RH Reality Check today:

“What we really want to pursue is making sure that taxpayer money doesn’t pay for abortion,” Cadman said when asked by Colorado Public Radio whether he’ll push to defund Planned Parenthood in 2016. “That’s the bottom line. And frankly that’s what our law provides and that’s the protection we want to ensure.”

State Republicans told the Durango Herald last month that they’ll push bills requiring women seeking abortions to be advised of burial and disposal options for their fetuses, and to prevent fetal tissue from being used in research. Another bill has already been introduced that could ban all abortion in Colorado.

Shortly after the Planned Parenthood terrorism in November, Gov. John Hickenlooper said that “inflammatory rhetoric” may drive “emotionally unstable or psychologically unbalanced” people to “commit these acts of unthinkable violence.” He asked people to done down the rhetoric.

Pro-choice activists made the same point later in a widely publicized news conference.