Pat Robertson: Mass shooters 'usually under the influence of psychedelic drugs'

Televangelist Pat Robertson says that he opposes President Barack Obama's efforts to limit high-capacity magazines and require universal background checks because most perpetrators of mass shootings are "usually under the influence of psychedelic drugs."

On Tuesday's edition of The 700 Club, Robertson noted that the president had traveled to Connecticut a day earlier to make the case for new gun control laws.

"Why don't you guys do something important?" the TV preacher asked.

"You just wonder why the president stakes everything on these peripheral issues," he added. "And so he wants to spend week after week after week hassling people about how many clips -- I mean, how many bullets in a magazine."

Robertson insisted that any new law would not work because "criminals are going to get guns, they'll buy them surreptitiously."

"If they really want to stop little children from getting shot in school, they ought to do something about health care. The people who do this shooting are normally -- I mean, not normally -- but usually under the influence of some kind of psychedelic drugs."

Robertson, however, was most likely referring to legally-prescribed anti-psychotic or psychotropic medication because there have no recent mass shootings attributed to illicit "psychedelic drugs" like so-called magic mushrooms or LSD.

In a rant on CNN earlier this year, conservative talk radio host Alex Jones shouted that psychotropic medications were "the real culprit — suicide pills! Mass murder pills!"

"They are prescribed drugs by their health care provider and they are a little bit psychotic or great deal psychotic," Robertson explained on Tuesday. "And it's the crazies who are doing this. It's not the guns that are shooting people. It is people who are mentally unstable who are in charge of the guns. And they can get the guns any place they want to."

A December report from The New York Daily News that said that Newtown shooter Adam Lanza was using the antipsychotic drug Fanapt fueled speculation that drugs were a contributing factor in the shooting. But the Daily News later corrected the report and removed all references to Lanza using Fanapt.

Watch this video from CBN's 700 Club, broadcast April 9, 2013.