Like many people in this day of the marijuana legalization movement, your reporters seem to have difficulty in differentiating causation from correlation.
The Herald (July 21) reports that, “If proven, it is at least the fourth home-invasion robbery involving marijuana in the past three years in La Plata County. Three of the robberies resulted in shooting deaths.”
It would appear that the reporter had either intent or agenda in this choice of verbiage, but then does nothing to make a point. I am not sure what is meant by “involving marijuana.”
The two murders that I am aware of, this one and the Samuel Gordon murder, involved lazy, desperate people who found themselves in desperate need of money. Marijuana is an easy target in that it is easily liquidable and, not withstanding marijuana stored securely at a dispensary, is also easy to gain access to, as we have seen in the black market crimes.
How did marijuana in itself cause this murder or Samuel Gordon’s? It may be correlated, just as the two crimes involved getaway vehicles, multiple participants and guns. Disrespect to the laws of society and unwillingness to be a part of society, laziness, greed and pathetic plans caused these murders, not marijuana. Marijuana is as legal to grow as tomatoes.
If the robbers had chosen to rob their victims of tomatoes or beer, would the Herald have made it a point of emphasis? Try and work on your objective journalism and leave your personal agendas out of it.
Jim Arndt
Dolores
