Give a kid a box of crayons and a piece of paper and they are going to draw all sorts of things. Flowers, rainbows, horses, fire trucks, daisies, dogs and cats and Mommies and Daddies, mostly rendered in erratic scribbles, especially if the artist is four-years-old and in kindergarten, like Jessie Sansone’s daughter, Neaveh.
Neaveh, a student at Forest Hills public school in Kitchener, Ont., drew a picture of her Daddy in class this week. Daddy was holding a gun. Upon seeing it, the teacher began asking questions, triggering an avalanche of unfortunate events that saw a triumph of procedure over common sense and an innocent man arrested at his daughter’s school and later strip-searched at the police station.
“I’m picking up my kids and then, next thing you know, I’m locked up,” Mr. Sansone told The Record, the local newspaper in Kitchener-Waterloo. “I was in shock. This is completely insane.
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Afternoon Updates:
East Germany – redux – what is old is new – the state is watching you through the best of observers – your family. Absolutely nuts!!!
I really shouldn’t be as flabbergasted as I am, but, whatever…
I’ve read everything I could find online about this story, which, except for the three articles in the National Post, isn’t much. Let’s see if I have this straight:
-Four-year-old girl draws picture of “Daddy with gun”…
-Teacher flips out and notifies the principal
-Principal flips out and notifies Social Services
-Social worker flips out and notifies police
-Daddy is arrested, strip searched and thrown in jail without being told why
-Mommy is also picked up and the other two kids are apprehended by social services
-Gun turns out to be a clear plastic toy
-A few hours later the hapless family is released with a lame apology
It would almost be easier to say what isn’t wrong with this picture than what IS wrong. I’d almost be willing to give the cops a pass since they were acting on the information provided by the hysterical social workers and “educators”. But then I thought “strip searched” and “not told why”? Did they think this guy was hiding a gun up his ass? Although I never saw it mentioned, I’ll assume one of the first things the police did was consult the gun registry… after all, the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs insist the police consult the registry “thousands” of times per day (yes, I know, this is misleading because every time a cop accesses the CPIC computer for any reason, it cross links to the gun registry, but let’s leave that aside). So Jessie Sansone’s name doesn’t appear on the gun registry. Would the police have handled their end of this debacle any differently if it had? I guess they’d merely be investigating some “safe storage” issues as opposed to “illegal possession of a firearm”.
But still… I digress badly…
The school, the social workers and the cops all insist they did everything exactly right.
I guess this is the really disturbing part… and they are going to cling to the dogma of having done everything by the book so tenaciously that I can’t see a snowflake’s chance in hell of any measure of justice for the Sansone family. While it’s nice to fantasize about lawsuits and punitive damages, you can bet that will never happen. Not in Canada, anyway, and especially not in Ontario.
I would like to see the “law” that compelled these “authorities” to act like flaming idiots. An even sweeter fantasy, in my mind, would be to take the authors of this piece of legislation, have them arrested, strip searched and held in cells for a few hours… as an object lesson in the laws of unintended consequences.
Thanks for putting up my post Jack. People have gone over the top on this one. As my post says, teachers and principals MUST report anything like this. If anything were to happen and they didn’t, they would not only lose their jobs, they would be legally negligent.
The bottom line is we are all human, cops, teachers, everyone. Mistakes or misjudgments are made. The sky is not falling. This has nothing to do with being a legal gun owner or not. Just imagine the opposite reaction is if this teacher did nothing and the little girl was injured or worse down the road. You can’t have it both ways.
And all this over-reaction by all sides will do is cause teachers and cops to second guess their decisions.
“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”, Sandy. The strip search bothers me. That doesn’t ring true because a quick frisk is usually all that is required when looking for guns carried by suspects.
Personally, I think the entire matter could have been handled much better than it apparently was but I’m satisfied to wait and see what else emerges from this “tawdry affair”.
One thing though is that he was charged with possession of an illegal handgun just based on the kid’s drawing and before the search of the home that found nothing.
Imagine if the guy was a legal gun owner and they would have obviously found firearms in the home: I think that its very likely that some bogus storage infraction would have been invented even if the firearms where stored properly. They might even have tried to say that the only way the little girl could have drawn the picture is because at some time, un-provable, the firearm wasn’t store properly ?
In any case there where no firearms in the house, but it does show that badly written gun laws can even affect people who don’t or would never want to own firearms !
Didn’t they check the registry that said he didn’t have firearms ? And if they did check they obviously didn’t think that the lack of registered firearms proved anything.
What if the guy had made a sudden move, being startled, and then shot …… OOOOOOPS, I guess.
That police felt the need to check things out is possibly debatable as justifiable, but charging the guy before anything was even found was abusive or at least stupid ? ( Assuming that we believe the reporting is accurate ).
Re: “Assuming that we believe the reporting is accurate”
It isn’t. You can trust me on that.
While Sandy is right that the law stipulates that you ‘must’, in actual fact you ‘must’ use the brains the Good Lord gave you to do a little digging before you fly off in a blind panic. A few astute questions of the wee one would have revealed that Daddy was playing with big Bro’s toy pistol. I’ve seen families destroyed by imaginary evil that the teacher or pastor thought was happening and reported. I maintain that too often the real abuse is perpetrated by the would be guardian who is acting on their own hypersensitive imagination and not hard fact. A picture of Daddy holding a gun “shooting bad guys and monsters” is not grounds to report as abuse. A picture of Daddy holding a gun shooting Mommy & or kids would be grounds to report.
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All important thoughts. Guess now we wait and see what really happened and why. Assuming those reasons are ever made public. For example, will we ever know how the little girl described her drawing?
Re: “For example, will we ever know how the little girl described her drawing?”
Since no charges were laid I doubt we will, Sandy.
We have only the parent’s word for what happened and while what they have said may well be true the police will remain silent. I note that access to information laws may used by the media to find out more. Therefore why I counsel “patience” and no prejudgement.
I’ll wait for it — as should the motoring public.
So overzealous nannystaters – what happens when the child draws/paints/writes a story about parents smoking in the home in the prescence of children? They will be sending in the swat teams to taz those anti-establishment malcontents into submission – the children draggged weeping and wailing into the loving care of nameless bureaucrats – who are only doing their jobs. A rule is a rule doncaha know!!! Sassafrass!!!