Wonkette
So here is one of those stories where the initial impression — “Maybe-crazy teacher was toting around an AR-15 just like the one used in the Newtown massacre!” — sounds like perfect Wonketfodder, and then you start looking at it more and finally you kind of throw your hands up in the air and wish you’d gone back to re-reading Scud: The Disposable Assassin, where it’s clear who the bad guys are. In keeping with Wonkette Policy, we will not be making fun of possibly-mentally-ill high school teacher Steven Davis, “a beloved science and math teacher at Mount Anthony Union High School” in Bennington, Vermont. Davis surrendered a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to police and was hospitalized for observation last week after neighbors spotted him carrying the weapon to his car; he also had posted several rambling, maybe-threatening videos to YouTube and his wife had taken their children from their home and gotten a protection order against him. Judges don’t grant those on a whim.
So yes, scary guy, but also probably not in his right mind, at least at the time he was posting those videos (which have since been removed by YouTube). But also “beloved teacher” who was apparently well-liked and functional before whatever breakdown sent him around the bend, so Wayne LaPierre’s awesome idea for a national registry of mentally ill people would have done absolutely nothing when Davis bought that gun in 2009. (One of the few brightly lit zones of moral clarity here: Wayne LaPierre sucks ass.)
