A little girl draws a picture of her Dad with a gun and a 26-year-old Kitchener, Ontario, man gets stripped by police. From The Toronto Star:
Sansone said he went to pick up his three children on Wednesday and was summoned to the principal’s office, where three police officers were waiting. They said he was being charged with possession of a firearm.
He was escorted from the school, handcuffed and put in a cruiser. At the same time, other officers went to his home, where his wife and 15-month-old child were waiting for him.
They made his wife come to the police station while the other three children were taken to Family and Children’s Services to be interviewed.
At the police station, Sansone was forced to remove his clothes for a full strip search.
Several hours later, a detective apologized and said he was being released with no charges, Sansone said.
The detective told him his daughter Neaveh had drawn a picture of a man holding a gun. When a teacher asked her who the man was, the girl replied, “That’s my daddy’s. He uses it to shoot bad guys and monsters.”
It should be unbelievable, but it’s not. Maybe you guys are on to something with your 2nd Amendment. I’m pretty sure George Washington was down with shooting monsters.
Hmm… so is this like Canadian thing? Because my 4 year old loves to “Hunt Zombies” in the basement with a flashlight and a plastic toy gun. I take it our plans to flee a Santorum Presidency by heading north is a bad one?
My four year old repeatedly tells me about his plans to shoot bad guys, his plan to be a bad guy shooting, and recently informed me that his daddy could beat up a monster (am I a bad wife to question this?).
Has this school ever dealt with children?
By son, five, insists that all the stories I tell him have battles. The longer the battle, the better.
Does he like Lord of the Rings?
Oh yes. He adores the Balrog scene, especially. Right now, though, his imagination is focused on Transformers.
I suspect my little boy and yours would get along. My son will bring me any two stick-like objects and insist on sword fighting. He also does baby boxing and pillow fights (he is a little younger than your boy).
I’ve heard of Transformers. Perhaps I should do some research for my son. I’m beginning to think Rainbow Bright and Stawberry Shortcake are not going to be a hit with him like they were for me as a small child.
We’ll worry when he starts asking for The Silmarillion.
My boy is growing out of the phase, but for years, any bent stick or two Legos could be a gun. Even without a TV to watch, he was into playing with guns & making explosion noises.
I have a guess to make about aspects of this case, which may make me look like a horrible elitist prat.
Neaveh is an increasingly popular name, one that I first encountered in practice a few years ago. Since then I’ve had a handful of patients with the name. For those of you unfamiliar, it is “heaven” spelled backward. Anyhow, here’s the part that’s going to make me look like a classist ass — pretty uniformly, the families who have chosen that name have been of limited financial means.
The only reason I think it’s even vaguely relevant to mention this is that I think “the system” is much more likely (certainly in the US) to exert its power to an inappropriate degree when the victims are of a lower socioeconomic status. That’s certainly been my observation — more affluent people are both aware of their own prerogatives to a much greater degree, and are far less willing to be pushed around when they feel their rights are being abrogated. Conversely, as they have access to resources that can push back against state overreach, agents of the state are less likely to push their luck.
I wonder if this case would have unfolded thusly if the father in question had been an upper middle class professional who had a few lawyers in his social circle. Which he may be, and I may be making a totally classist, unfair guess based solely on his daughter’s name.
Russell, this seems like a solid hypothesis. There are other things about the story that would support that (Kitchener isn’t known as a haven of wealth), and I have little doubt that if a lawyer’s daughter drew such a thing, things wouldn’t have progressed the same way.
So… This means he WAS happy to see them… right? I always get this joke mixed up.