This is an ugly story, of an ugly individual, inflicting ugly things upon an ugly world. It is, in effect, the capturing of a zeitgeist.

This is a sentence I’d never thought I would ever write: common sense and truth have prevailed in America.

Chief Inspector Jason Kew offered the usual pitiful excuse for this surrender, that it would “free up” time for his force to focus on “serious” crime, implying that teenagers openly smoking cannabis, inhaling nitrous oxide and snorting cocaine in public isn’t serious.

Why does this matter? Because cannabis alters perceptions and behaviour, and induces, amongst other things, paranoia; and because it might be that a mind dulled and warped by cannabis finds it easier to plunge a knife into someone repeatedly, or run a lot of people over, or blow a lot of people up.