Idiot Blames Marijuana for the Tucson Shootings

As the nation mourned this weekend's tragedy in Arizona, David Frum took the opportunity to pen an early contender for dumbest blog post of the year with this shameful suggestion that the killer's actions may have resulted from marijuana use.

After horrific shootings, we hear calls for stricter regulation of guns. The Tucson shooting should remind us why we regulate marijuana.

Jared Lee Loughner, the man held as the Tucson shooter, has been described by those who know as a “pot smoking loner.”
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After the Tucson shooting, there may be renewed pressure to control the weapons that committed the crime. But what about the drugs that may have aggravated the killer’s mental disease? The trend these days seems toward a more casual attitude and easier access to those drugs. Among the things we should be discussing in the aftermath of this horror is the accumulating evidence of those drugs’ potential contribution to making some dangerous people even more dangerous than they might otherwise have been.

Someone actually wrote this. It's amazing, isn’t it? Here we are grieving over a national tragedy and along comes David Frum mindlessly extrapolating sweeping policy recommendations based on schoolyard rumors that a crazy person reportedly smoked pot for a period of time. Frum fails to even mention Loughner's alcohol use, and certainly doesn't endorse banning booze as a means of providing for the sobriety of all the dangerous psychos who've been known to down a drink or four. I'm sure that thought never even crossed his mind.

Of course, in the aftermath of any heartbreaking national tragedy, you can count on dimwitted agenda-driven hacks on all sides of the political spectrum to engage in reckless scapegoating. That's typical behavior in our political culture, and when it comes to drugs, an abundance of already-ingrained prejudices and stereotypes can sometimes give undue momentum to moronic theories and mindless speculation. That remains the case despite evolving public attitudes, but if we weren't making important progress, it's doubtful that increasingly desperate and tasteless attacks like Frum's would emerge in the first place.