By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist

Who can blame George Tiller's family for declining to re-open his clinic? They understand that to do so would put more more physicians and staff at risk of harassment, threats and bodily harm.

But the clinic's closing means the killer has achieved his objective. That's a thought akin to an open wound. The decision also means, for Kansas women in crisis, a yawning gap between abortion clinics in the Kansas City area and Denver.

The only positive development that would come out of the tragedy would be the departure of Operation Rescue from Kansas.

"We have worked very hard for this day, but we wish it would have come through the peaceful, legal channels that we were pursuing," Troy Newman, the organization's president, said Tuesday. "We believe we were very close to seeing disciplinary action taken against Tiller's license that would have closed this clinic through due process."

Not all the group's channels were peaceful. Operation Rescue publicized the names and addresses of staffers who worked at Tiller's clinic. For a while, they went so far as to send residents postcards alerting them to the fact that a neighbor was involved with abortions. Read this 2004 piece from Rolling Stone for more about Operation Rescue's tactics.

As for the claim that the group was close to getting Tiller's license revoked by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts, let's not forget that, time and time again, "evidence" of wrongdoing turned up by Operation Rescue was found to be baseless. I'll predict that whatever the Board of Healing Arts was examining was more of the same.

Scott Roeder, the Kansas City-area man accused of shooting Tiller to death in his church, apparently is already bored in jail, because he keeps encouraging interviews with the news media. He doesn't like the food and he finds his quarters a bit chilly.

WE Blog, the Wichita Eagle's opinion blog, shrewdly notes the irony of a guy who didn't think he needed to pay taxes now moaning about the kind of services he's receiving from the state.