In a piece for The Daily Beast Tuesday, Michael Tomasky argues that “Freddie Gray never had a chance,” but not because of all the standard leftist talking points (well, not exactly). The real reason Gray resorted to a life of crime that ended up with him being arrested after fleeing the police and dying in the back of a transport van: lead paint (oh yeah, and conservatives).
Citing a Washington Post piece that makes a similar argument, Tomasky explains that recent research shows that lead poisoning leads not only to ADHD but to “social dysfunction,” violence and crime. Saying that Gray "certainly" had "other problems"—including being “born prematurely to a mother who may have been using heroin while pregnant”—Tomasky notes that Gray tested positive at a young age for lead poisoning, his family even winning a lawsuit against the landlord for the issues.
Lead poisoning, he explains, has been a major problem all over West Baltimore, where “thousands of kids like him, breathing lead paint fumes, swallowing the little chips that got stuck under their fingernails, and so on."
And what did this do to him? Obviously we don’t exactly know in his case. But we’ve known for a long time that lead makes children sick and impairs mental functions.
Highlighting a few recent studies, Tomasky explains that overexposure to lead is “not just about learning disorders,” research suggesting that the effects of lead poisoning may be linked to “social dysfunction of the sort Gray exhibited, and even a tendency toward violence and crime.”
And, Tomasky states, while the lead abatement program started in 1992 has been "pretty successful" in neighborhoods that are "middle class and up," Congress has "predictably enough" failed to ensure that lower-class housing has been as thoroughly addressed. Recently, the sequester (which he emphasizes was "largely forced on us by the Tea Partiers") greatly reduced funding for the program.
The self-described left-leaning Tomasky graciously throws conservatives a bone by saying they don't have everything in the "personal responsibility" argument wrong, admitting, "on some level, individuals are responsible for their own actions." That obvious, inarguable point made, Tomasky goes back to The Daily Beast's bread and butter - bashing conservatives by prophesying that in the future when the lead poisoning science is settled, the ever-practical left will make sure programs are launched to correct the issue, while conservatives will "stand athwart history" and blame the poor (i.e., minorities):
But conservatives will stand athwart history yelling stop as they always do—the moral scolds will blame single parents, and the ones who just don’t want their tax money spent on the moocher class will whistle up outfits like the Competitive Enterprise Institute to produce alternative “studies” questioning what actual science knows to be obvious, and we will be stalemated. And that will be another “choice” that people poor [sic] didn’t make that will help consign their children to society’s margins.
Nowhere in his rant does Tomasky manage to mention that Baltimore has been run by Democrats for decades.
