How Bad Could the Satanic Panic Have Gotten?

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Utterly horrible if you're sent there, but you'd see less school shootings if it were so easy to commit someone who anyone had reasonably suspicion they were about to try and kill their classmates. And if we have "more school shootings = Satanic Panic", well...

There a text book fallacy there somewhere, but I dont keep up on such things. In part it revolves around the ability to correctly identify the threat. A large number of skilled mental health professionals are required to figure out who might be candidates for incarceration. Otherwise you have the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of spurious police calls whenever there is a public 'concern' over some issue or other. Sweeping up tens of thousands of teenagers & 25 year olds who still live in Moms basement wont keep us safe from school massacres anymore than the mandatory prison sentences stopped the drug epidemic. In the long run it may actually aggravate the problem as ordinary teenagers are turned into lifetime suspects and social outcasts due to their time in a mental institution. In the shorter run its going to be impossible for the Mental Health professionals to keep up with the sort of case load this can produce. It takes ten to fifteen years education and experience to come close to the skill level necessary.

A second problem is abuse of the system as folks with a agenda of their own target kids from families they dont like for incarceration. Want to cripple a small business man, your competion? Distract him & his wife by having a local judge you can bribe sign a warrant for a teens incarceration on a mental health. Dont think this can happen? I saw it happen in a family fight over a multi million dollar estate. One member was shut up by the county judge the family owned.

I've spent fifteen years on the board & something less as a case manager of non profit orgs. that deal with a wide variety of 'At Risk' people. One of the core lessons I've learned is just how difficult it is to evaluate the threat within a stream of people you interview daily.

One other problem here is in how unsafe confinement facilities are. Shut 10,000 teenage boys up in hastly set up confinement system & the death rate in that population will soar well above school shooting tallys. Hell the death rate from badly trained and screened workers acting incompetent at the facilities would very likely exceed what we have seen add up from school shootings.
 
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I played in High School in the late 70's and in college in the 80's - the game was really gathering steam and the spin-off's (TRAVELLER, GAMMA WORLD, etc.) were coming around at that time. So I do see a backlash against any and all RPG's...

Yeah, in the 70s and 80s, I agree (Mazes and Monsters was made for a reason), but are we talking about the original scenario or the Marilyn Manson-themed one?
 
Yeah, in the 70s and 80s, I agree (Mazes and Monsters was made for a reason), but are we talking about the original scenario or the Marilyn Manson-themed one?

The original scenario was for the late 80's when RPG's were out in force and the Manson one the early 80's, so I still see a backlash either way...
 
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