UPDATE – The folks over a Reason pointed out some additional reporting on this story that changes everything. It appears that the reason McLaw was administered an emergency medical evaluation was because he sent a four-page letter to the school, not because he wrote a novel. Thanks to some local reporter, this story has been blown out of proportion.

The asinine school board of Dorchester County, Maryland, just banned teacher Patrick McLaw from school property, sent him to an “emergency medical evaluation” and searched the middle school where he taught for bombs and guns because he wrote a novel about a fictional school shooting placed 900 years into the future called “The Insurrectionist.” Let that sink in: The school board just suspended an English teacher for writing a novel. Never mind McLaw wrote the novel under a pseudonym two years before beginning to teach at the middle school. The First Amendment doesn’t apply in PC School-land, apparently, because violence is scary and literature must be approved by the school board. Up until the middle of August, it seemed like McLaw was going to be a great middle school Language Arts teacher. After graduated Salisbury University in three years, McLaw was a year-deep into his first job as a teacher and he already helped a student find success publishing a novel. It seems McLaw’s only mistake was that he didn’t name his fictional school “Hogwarts.” More…