In Mother Maryland You Dont Write Books, Books Write You...

Rereading published reports today it's less clear what happened. The Atlantic states (somewhat breathlessly):

While the local news states:

It doesn't sound like he was seen by a psychiatrist. It sounds like they took him to the local ER and he wasn't admitted. Erratic but unmenacing behavior could get you a trip to the ER. It does seem he won't be teaching there anymore.

I think McLaw has grounds for a lawsuit.

You're naive Steve if you think they can't get a judge to sign off anything.

Packard has done such an outstanding job in this thread that I'm almost inclined to petition not to have him banned for at least another day or two.

Almost...

Ahh...sent off to Reeducation for Thought Crimes--to the cheers of some of WF's best Lefties. I wish I could say I was surprised by any of this.

[edited to add]

I'm confused by Garamet's reaction to this thread. I suppose I could attribute it to the fact that the thread was started by flow, and that's why she traipsed in and started shitting it up, since he's in her doghouse. Otherwise, nothing about her responses make sense.

As an author, you'd think she'd be outraged at the persecution of a fellow author who was exercising his 1st amendment rights. As a liberal, you'd think she would be outraged at the fascist police state tactics, since that's the narrative we've been force-fed for the past two weeks by the lamestream media covering Ferguson. Whisking this kid away, detaining him against his will, ransacking his home, forcing him to undergo a "medical" evaluation, and engaging in an orchestrated campaign to destroy his reputation and career by gating him blackballed from any other job in education all along the eastern seaboard? All because he published a story or two that depicted fictional accounts of school massacres? I would have thought she'd be ringing the alarm bells and shouting from the rafters.

Make any argument you want about the kid's lack of judgment in writing such tales while planning a career in education in post-Columbine Amerika. I'd probably agree. But this Orwellian bullshit? No way. This kid has done nothing illegal, yet his life is being destroyed. I hope there's a lawyer out there willing to go to bat for this kid, because what's happening to him is making the William Jewell lynching look like a walk in the park.

So what gives Garamet? You really think this couldn't happen anywhere else in Amerika?

It doesn't seem to have worked. You're still posting teh Stupid.

Great post! Placeholder for now...I will get back to this.

I'll just sit in the corner and STFU until more is known.

You may be right and they may have valid reasons for doing what they did. They wouldn't have to go into details. They could just say he was acting wrong. Of course it's not a violation of his privacy to acknowledge if he was charged or not. And where he is. And why he can't leave where he is especially if he's not under arrest. There are no HIPPA laws regarding what the police did.

But so far all the indications point to that someone found out he wrote a book three years ago on a school massacre and everyone went bonkers and violated his rights from top to bottom.

Yeah, I don't know what to think about this yet.

On the one hand, when you see a news story along the lines of "You won't BELIEVE the little thing that led to this outrageous overreaction," it usually turns out there's a lot more to the story.

On the other hand, if a staggering overreaction to something tiny is going to happen, a school is the most likely place. Columbine saw to that, along with legions of overprotective parents who are constantly just one TV sweeps-week special report away from demanding that their children be encased in bubble wrap at all times.

Why are you surprised by my response? I’ve told you for years that if you ever stopped trolling and asked direct, legitimate questions, I’d give you a considered answer. So here it is:

First, I don’t have a “doghouse.” As I indicated in my very first post in this thread, it was obvious that evenflow was playing Gotcha. His goal was to say “See? The very same people who’ll defend the First Amendment are the ones who are trying to destroy the Second!” But his motivation was so obvious that no one fell for it. Oh, except for Zombie, who will use any excuse to trot out his “All libruls suck!” speech, whether it’s pertinent to the discussion or not.

Having said that, as of yesterday I was only vaguely aware of this story. Glanced at it, saw what numerous others have seen here – that it’s not about suppressing Patrick McLaw’s (interesting name, in context) right to write fiction, but about an hysterical overreaction by his employers exacerbated by stupid law enforcement tricks.

As such, it seemed to me equally newsworthy with those “Kid Expelled for Praying in School” and “Kid Arrested for Pointing His Finger Like a Gun” and “Kindergartener Has ‘Sexual Pervert’ Entered on His Permanent Record for Hugging Fellow Student” stories – hysteria on the part of a small group of local ignorami that makes national headlines because the 24/7 news cycle has gotten bored waiting for Joan Rivers to emerge from her medically-induced coma.

So that was the level of credence I gave it – local story, badly managed, not the MEGA PARANOID THREAT TO THE FIRST AMENDMENT that evenflow was trying to trap some people into believing it was just so he could turn it into a “They’re taking UR GUNZ!” thread.

Speaking of which:

Assault rifle sales sluggish because cruel dictator Obama still hasn't banned them

But I digress…

So of course Zombie bit, and he’ll have a load of shit to respond to this post, and Faceman will do his classic TL;DR but, again, I digress.

Having had some time since yesterday to learn more about this story, I agree with steve2^4 and tafkats that there’s got to be more to it than meets the eye. It looks as if “unknown sources” – i.e., a snitch with a grudge – informed the school administration about McLaw’s literary efforts and set this thing in motion for reason or reasons unknown to the public.

Now, given that McLaw wrote these novels under a pseudonym, logic suggests that the snitch was likely someone who knew him really well. Disgruntled ex-gf? Vengeful “friend”? Or did he offhandedly mention the books or his pen name to his students? Some kid who’s failing his class looks up his work on Amazon, tells Mommy and Daddy? A Snitch Is Born.

OTOH, as others have said, the hoohah over the novels may be just a cover story for details we have no access to. So on that level, I for one am prepared to wait and see what emerges now that this story has gone national.

But, to reiterate, this is not a First Amendment issue. No overarching Big Brother agency has demanded that McLaw’s books be pulled from retailers and burned in the public square. And, entirely unrelated to who did what here, those novels will sell post this event. That’s the reality. But because I referred to it as “capitalism” (what else would it be, exactly?), Federal Farmer got all upsetted.

Can something like this happen anywhere that human beings make stupid, over-reactive decisions? Absolutely. In the time it’s taken this story to break, several dozen teachers have probably been let go on similar pretexts but with far less media coverage. Concomitantly, at least an equal number have not been called to account for egregious behaviors and their behaviors have for various reasons been covered up, as the almost-daily reports about long-concealed pedophilia remind us.

But no matter how you slice it, this is not a First Amendment issue. It’s not even a Second Amendment issue. If, as I said in my first post, it had been presented honestly, I’d have given it a considered opinion at the time.

The Usual Suspects have already told me “what you REALLY mean” in this thread. You’re the first to ask me a straightforward question, so you get a considered answer.

Let’s do this again sometime.

Erm, actually....

Pooty-Poot ends Obama's string as Gander Mountain Salesman of the Month.

This just in....

Reports circulated this weekend that a middle school teacher in Dorchester County, Md., had been placed on administrative leave over his two futuristic novels about school violence. That is not that case, authorities tell the L.A. Times.

"It didn't start with the books and it didn't end with the books," State's Attorney for Wicomico County Matt Maciarello told The Times. "It's not even a factor in what law enforcement is doing now."

Concerns about McLaw were raised after he sent a four-page letter to officials in Dorchester County. Those concerns brought together authorities from multiple jurisdictions, including health authorities.

McLaw's attorney, David Moore, tells The Times that his client was taken in for a mental health evaluation. "He is receiving treatment," Moore said.

Because of HIPPA regulations mandating privacy around healthcare issues, he was unable to say whether McLaw has been released.

McLaw's letter was of primary concern to healthcare officials, Maciarello says. It, combined with complaints of alleged harassment and an alleged possible crime from various jurisdictions led to his suspension. Maciarello cautions that these allegations are still being investigated; authorities, he says, "proceeded with great restraint."

What's more, he told The Times, "everyone knew about the book in 2012."​

source

You'd think 'flow would know better, wouldn't you?

Meh. Still gives the lie to the "They're taking UR GUNZ" hysteria.

Another update. Looking more and more like a lot of hype, and bad reporting.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/02/answers-teacher-was-not-given-mental-exa

So... is the LA Times book-section the last bastion of investigative journalism?

Edit: the Atlantic wag read the LA piece and decided to call the people involved to get some, uh, facts. It seems all he did was read the local reports.

He's still holding (somewhat breathlessly) to they were motivated by his writings but in addition to his aberrant behavior and is "underwhelmed" by their response.

He does offer the additional tidbits that McLaw was building a scale model of the school and asked that his classrooms be moved closer to the exits. Perhaps we should schedule an intervention with the Forbin household.

updated page

Well put. Yesterday's hippies are today's fascists. Proof that for some it was really more about who was in charge rather than any idealogical principle.

Good to hear but still disturbing how many people here would have been okay with the story being true.

TLDR.

I can't respond line by line on my phone, so a full response will have to wait until later today when I'm home. I will say that after reading the updates to the story, it seems less like a 1st amendment case and more an Orwellian convergance of factors triggered by an emotionally distraught kid upset over a breakup and unresolved family drama who wrote a letter to his employer that likely included some vaguesuicidal language. Law enforcement is now now trying to justify their public lynching of this kid by smearing his reputation, making vague allusions to possible other unspecified crimes & "wrongdoing" along with a supposed previous harrassment allegation that likely has nothing whatsoever to do with the current situation.

The whole thing is pathetic, the kids life is being destroyed. At the end of the day the kid has done nothing wrong or illegal.

I do find the story disturbing because it seems that more and more of this kind of thing is happening, and the American public has been conditioned to accept it, largely because if you protest it you will become the target of an "investigation" yourself.

And the corporate-owned media? Useless. Real investigative reporting is dead in this country and has been for years. What passes for journalism these days is copying & pasting sanitized press releases and Twitter tweets.

Are you saying a person's words, whether written or spoken, should have no consequence? I think you're confusing the 1st amendment with the right to be stupid.

I'm a bit surprised by this thread.

After all, wasn't an overwhelming refrain of gunforge that the sharp uptake of massacres in the last 20 years more of a mental health issue than a gun availability issue?

How do you stop potential massacres without proactively investigating?

As far as I'm concerned, giving the government a mandate to make sure people aren't a threat is a far more worrying rights issue than putting in some sane gun laws. There's some very slippery slopes there.

And this is what that looks like.

Nobody was okay with that. Some of us were able to see through the OMG aspect of the story to note that it was a deeply flawed presentation, one that required more information before making a decision to condemn.

No surprise, of course, that you were among the band wagon folks willing to believe anything anti-government no matter that the story was deeply lacking in any actual reporting.

Those calling for a beefed-up mental health system whose goal would be to create a Minority Report-like mechanism to identify potential threats never had any real clue how the mental health system operates and what's it's limitations are. And they didn't seem to recognize the enormous potential for abuse. It was always just nice - sounding rhetoric pushed by the NRA to shift blame & responsibility.

With the mental health system, you put people in the position of having to disprove a negative.

"Prove you aren't a threat."
"Well, I haven't committed any crime and I have no desire or urge to kill people."
"Not good enough, there are signs you have some serious emotional problems. You own a handgun, so obviously you have violent tendencies. We found a DVD box set of The Walking Dead season 2 in your apartment so obviously you're attracted to depictions of torture & death. Your girlfriend broke with you 3 months ago and you don't always get along with your mother. All these things put together mean you're a legitimate threat to blow up a school."
"None of the things you've listed logically lead to that conclusion."
"Prove it."

And on and on it will go. Mental health professionals are by and large liberal progressives. The profession on a national level supports liberal agendas. Your typical masters-level therapist is going to be predisposed to think that anyone who owns firearms or doesn't support liberal political agendas (you don't support gay marriage? You don't agree with abortion on demand? SHOCK! GASP!) has "mental health" issues. You want some counselor two years out of grad school working for the local community health center making $30,000 a year writing a report suggesting you might be on your way to shooting up a school? I don't.

How you'd even come to that conclusion is beyond mystifying. So, because you can't be draconian on one thing, you have to be on another, because that'll totally fix things.

I doubt that's his position. He's just, as he says, citing the overwhelming refrain of gunforge. Of course, we also recognize it as a distraction, but it's not as if it isn't repeated here ad naseam.

I'm sorry, but if I were a teacher, school shootings would be very much on my mind nowadays... How a shooter might attack, what would I do and how I could protect the kids and myself... I'd think about it a lot. I might even get a few ideas to put together a compelling piece of fiction.

Just reading it, I don't see a need for alarm, but I don't know this guy. Maybe there's something else about him that sets off alarms that caused this over reaction. I say that if this is the case, I would imagine that a professional investigation would protect this guys privacy until they had something more concrete instead of ruining this young man's carreer on a whim... But that's just me.