Ever since Robert Dear opened fire on a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs last month, many anti-abortion activists have been trying to claim that Dear was not motivated by opposition to abortion rights, something that has become increasingly difficult as information about him emerges.
But one diehard skeptic, it seems, is Stuart Shepard of CitizenLink, the political arm of the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family.
In an interview on “The Meeting House,” an Alabama Christian radio program that was posted on the program’s website last Friday, Stuart speculated that Dear just “ended up at Planned Parenthood” and that he could have been having a “psychotic episode” caused by marijuana edibles.
“If you trace his path backwards from where he ended up at Planned Parenthood to that grocery store where the first person was shot and go back another half mile, you know what they sell there?” he asked. “It’s a couple of marijuana shops.”
“I don’t know the facts of this case,” he acknowledged, “but I’m sure law enforcement is looking into this, we’ve had multiple instances of people consuming what are called marijuana edibles … I’d just be curious to know if he stopped by one of those. We’ve had a number of folks who have eaten these things and then had psychotic episodes.”
“It’s the kind of thing that happens when you make marijuana legal in a state,” he argued, “but it doesn’t get reported widely because it doesn’t fit the narrative of the mainstream news media that’s very, you know. Well, the same thing’s happening here, you wonder, you know, what exactly happened.”
We’ll give Shepard the benefit of the doubt and assume that the interview was recorded before Dear announced in court that he was a “warrior for babies,” but by last week he would have still had plenty of time to have read up on the shooter’s admiration for the violent anti-abortion group Army of God and would have certainly heard the early reports that Dear muttered something to law enforcement officers about “no more baby parts,” a reference to the Center for Medical Progress’ videos smearing Planned Parenthood.
Maybe Shepard got his theory from Bryan Fischer.
