COLORADO SPRINGS — After the congregation shared memories of a fallen police officer, Garrett Swasey, and cheered and cried through a grainy video of him competing at a 1992 skating championship, its members bowed their heads on Sunday morning to pray for the man accused of killing him at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

“Does anyone know the name of this man who shot Garrett?” asked Scott Dontanville, a pastor at Hope Chapel, where Officer Swasey had been a church elder. Someone in the audience responded: Robert L. Dear Jr., 57, an isolated man who left a long trail of arrests and clashes with neighbors and others in his life.

“I pray for his soul, Lord, wherever he may be,” Mr. Dontanville said. “We forgive him. We can’t not.”

On Sunday, people across this shaken city gathered at services like this one, seeking answers and comfort two days after the five-hour siege at a Planned Parenthood clinic left three people dead, Officer Swasey among them, and wounded nine. Two civilians killed in the shooting, Ke’Arre M. Stewart, a 29-year-old former soldier and Iraq war veteran, and Jennifer Markovsky, 35, a mother of two who was married to an Army veteran, were identified on Sunday by relatives.

The attack sparked a national debate over gun control and abortion, as supporters of Planned Parenthood described the shooting as domestic terrorism that had been fueled by anti-abortion comments, while some Republicans insisted that both sides needed to tone down their oratory.

The shootings have also been wrenching for this state, whose recent history of gun massacres and its narrow political divisions between Democrats and Republicans have made it a national battleground in the fight over gun control. And they have torn at the conservative heart of this city, where transplants from the South have recreated a small patch of the Bible Belt in the West.

Image Robert L. Dear Jr. Credit... El Paso County Sheriff's Office

Gun control and abortion are both unpopular in Colorado Springs, home to multiple military installations and Focus on the Family, a conservative organization. Anti-abortion protesters have gathered weekly outside the Planned Parenthood clinic — including the day of the shooting. But since Friday, the city has also seen an outpouring of support for the victims and condemnation of the violence.

Investigators are interviewing Mr. Dear’s friends, associates and relatives to determine whether he had ties to any extremist groups or if anyone helped him plot the attack, according to senior law enforcement officials. The authorities also want to know whether Mr. Dear told anyone about his intentions in recent weeks, the officials said. Among the people who have been interviewed is one of Mr. Dear’s girlfriends, the officials said.

But so far, the authorities have found no evidence that he had help from anyone, the officials said, and his motives remain unclear — though Mr. Dear had said “no more baby parts” in a rambling interview with the authorities after his arrest.

Throughout the day, elected officials from both parties weighed in on the meaning of the attack. Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Democrat, called the shooting a “form of terrorism” on CNN’s “State of the Union,” and urged the country to find ways “to make sure we keep guns out of the hands of people that are unstable.” Colorado has been the site of two other mass shootings, at Columbine High School in 1999 and at a movie theater in Aurora in 2012.

His views were echoed by Mayor John Suthers of Colorado Springs, a Republican, who said on ABC’s “This Week” that the country needed to better identify people with “mental health problems and prevent their access to weapons.”

On the same program, Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas who heads the Homeland Security Committee, said, “I do think we have to address mental health.” But he also suggested that new laws might not be needed, saying, “I think we also need to enforce existing law,” and noting that under current law some people with mental illnesses cannot own fire arms.