WASHINGTON: The headlines do not scream ''Another terrorist attack in America,'' because no one is describing it as a terrorist attack. But that is what it was -- because it meets the government’s definition and criteria of a terrorist strike.

Robert Lewis Dear, 57, a suspected anti-abortion activist charitably described in the American media as a ''gunman,'' stormed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, resulting in the death of two civilians, a police officer, and multiple casualties after an hours-long shootout that ended with his capture or surrender.

Planned Parenthood, a non-profit organization that provides reproductive health services including abortions in the United States and internationally, has been in the cross hairs of American anti-abortion activists, who have launched several attacks on its clinics.

But US entities are loath to call them terrorist attacks although they meet the FBI’s definition of terrorism: ''The unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.''

The fear is that it will lead down a slippery slope, since many groups use force and violence all too easily in the U.S given the easy availability of guns. In fact, there have been petitions to declare the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization for their promotion of guns.

Several influential commentators have pressed the State Department to at least add NRA to the terrorist watchlist, while others have pointed out that more American lives are lost to domestic gun violence in the U.S. than to foreign terrorism or even U.S casualties abroad in the so-called war on terror. Some have gone so far as to suggest NRA is a state-sponsored terrorist group.

"One terrorist group is responsible for more civilian deaths since December 2012 (the Sandy Hook massacre) than Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas and the Taliban. Yet it is the only nearly-state sponsored terrorist group that is not listed by the U.S. State Department as such.

It is the National Rifle Association and for their unending lobbying that’s kept a lid on gun control we now have 428 times more American deaths by gun than deaths by foreign terrorists,'' NY Daily News columnist Linda Stasi wrote last month.

Stasi pointed out that Between 2012 and 2015, according to University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, ISIS has murdered approximately 12,138 civilians, Boko Haram,10,092, the Taliban 9,427 and Hamas, 85. In that time, Americans have murdered or spree killed via gun and assault rifle, 87,423 people in the United States. Terrorism killed 28 Americans per year on both U.S. soil and abroad according to the Global Terrorism Database.

But while the NRA argues for guns on dubious interpretation of the second amendment (The Right to Bear Arms), violent anti-abortion activists don’t have a leg to stand for their attacks in a country that presents itself to the world as a progressive, modern democracy, their regressive virulence no better than that of the Taliban's.

Such is the fear of this toxic constituency that Planned Parenthood, which was founded as the American Birth Control League in 1921, changed its name in 1942. But 75 years on, the fear is even greater because of the use of guns.

On Friday, Democratic primary front-runner Hillary Clinton sent out a tweet supporting Planned Parenthood while the standoff was still ongoing. ''Today and every day, we #StandWithPP,'' she wrote.

No word about calling the attack an act of terror.