Thank goodness the CIA didn’t investigate my preschool drawings. I went wild with pencil and pen, drawing such mayhem that surely my parents should have been hauled into a klieg-lit interrogation room.
But they weren’t. Such dystopian dynamics had to wait a few decades and befall 4-year-old Nevaeh Sansone and her father, Jessie Sansone, of Kitchener, Ontario.
At school, Nevaeh drew a picture of her father holding a pistol. What was her father doing with the gun? Reportedly, little Nevaeh informed adults, and I use that term loosely, her dad was “getting the bad guys and monsters.”
No wonder, then, that when Jesse Sansone came to pick up Nevaeh and his other kids at school, he was picked up, instead, by police.
The child’s concerned teacher had tattled to school officials, who then contacted Family and Children’s Services, who brought in the, uh, big guns — who arrested and strip-searched the child’s father.
Waterloo Regional Police Inspector Kevin Thaler informed reporters that Nevaeh and her siblings told police where in the house the gun was stored and that the children had accessed it.
“It is a four-year-old that we’re taking the information from,” Thaler explained, “but the fact is that this disclosure was very descriptive and very alarming to the officers investigating this.”
He elaborated: “The kids were scared.”
Yeah, I’ll bet they were.
After several hours of harassing the children, humiliating the father and scaring the pregnant mother, the cops figured out that the gun was a toy. According to the father, it was “completely transparent. It doesn’t even resemble a real gun, at all.”
Fake gun. Real panic. Foolish, fear-ridden officialdom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.