At the beginning of the siege in Colorado Springs, during which one Robert Lewis Dear killed three people, injured several others, and holed up in an area Planned Parenthood, most of the details, including those above, were unknown. The only thing observers of Social Media knew was that the shooting was taking place at/near Planned Parenthood. This information sparked a deluge of verbal abuse from the Usual Suspects: against Christians, Republicans, the NRA, the Tea Party–and, most significantly, all gun owners and fans of the Second Amendment. This was no surprise, since it has happened either during or in the wake of any mass shooting where the perpetrator is not black.

The things that torqued me off the most, however, were the comments by some of my personal acquaintances who are pro-choice. Before any of us knew anything, these people were telling us to “look into our hearts” and other nonsense—as if anyone who has ever publicly opposed abortion or called out Planned Parenthood for its prevalence in black neighborhoods was guilty of gunning down innocent people ourselves.

I managed to keep my cool and persuaded them to wait and see what to conclude when the facts came out.

Then, merely days later, a man and a woman decided to shoot up the Inland Regional Facility in San Bernardino–killing 14 and injuring many others–and the rhetoric began again. This time, my friends kept mostly silent, but the Twitter Left did not.

Yo GOP, kinda hard to talk about “keeping people safe” when your peeps are shooting up America.

— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) December 2, 2015

As it turns out, at least one of the names of the perpetrators is Arabic. If I search my “heart,” I find myself coming to one conclusion.

Fourteen years ago, we were advised to “look into our hearts” and try to understand “why they hate us.” Well, I’m all for introspection but only to a point. I no longer care why jihadis hate me. However, I believe that it is those who would see Americans disarmed against nutcases like Dear or agains jihadis who need to look into their own hearts and ask themselves why they care more about a system which is designed to get rid of nascent life than they care about those who would see us all converted to Islam by the sword.

Whatever they find inside of those black little hearts of theirs is not my business. But I will not be silent about abortion or about Islam and I know that I’m not alone.

Juliette Ochieng blogs here as baldilocks.