It seems very strange to me. There are thousands, if not millions,  of Canadians who own guns - some of whom are parents. Most take care of their guns and lock them away for safety. I wonder if the child said other things that aren't being reported in that story?

It does seem very strange to me too.  Somehow there must be more to the story ...

And I would imagine quite a lot of kids draw guns & talk about their big brave Dads 'heroic' deeds ... but I wouldn't think the CAS would automatically be called every time ... still scratching my head about this.

We ALWAYS had a gun in the house growing up in Ontario. Dad hunted groundhogs for relaxation. He's go hike "the back 40" -Neighbour's farmland and shot groundhogs. We lived out in the country. Dad had grown up on a farm.

Gun was kept on top of tall cabinet in the room between the house and garage. Box of shells was up there to.

We NEVER touched or played with the shotgun.

Exactly Tabitha.

I wonder if some kids observe parents playing some of the current video games - where pursuit & shooting of 'bad guys' is the essential activity.  I wonder if kids seeing that might comment about it at school ("my Dad shoots lots of bad guys") but omit the part about it being a video game ... and the comment be misinterpreted?

Yes the teacher/school  failed to take in consideration a four year old child's PERCEPTION of  things, and their imagination.

According to this news report - the only gun the police found was a toy gun: http://www.torontosun.com/2012/02/25/arrested-dad-wants-answers-after-daughter-draws-gun-pic.

Thank you somegal.  I wondered if any guns were found.  Not that it would be significant if the guns were properly registered and stored.  (I would think the first step the police would take would be to check the gun registry - oh, but that is being destroyed).  

Those poor children - I can imagine how frightened and confused they would be.

One wonders when they hear these stories about good responsible parents being harassed on suspection when we also hear of children dying while in the care of parents when social workers had been aware of their family situation for years.  

I think this was a sever over reaction by the school.

We all know that 4 year olds draw vivid pictures.  Apparently she told the teacher that daddy shoots the monsters under her bed.

I can see the scenarior of child afriad of shadows under the bed, daddy doing a nightly routine of hunting them down.

Oddly the father is involved in the school. Goes in as a guest teacher for sports or some such thing.  A phone call by the principal and a chat about what she drew is surely the first step.

damned Libbies red tories commies gun nuts libertarians right-wingers muslims fiendish fluoridators pro-Israelis ecofreaks capitalists baby buggerers! :3

This is an example of group hysteria. What worries me is that the child was interrogated at least four times.

My experience is that a child, even a four year old, knows when they are interrogated by the CAS and the police. When a child I cared for was removed from class and interrogated by the CAS I told the principal that he would never be completely  comfortable in school again.

He's 17 now and, unfortunately, proving me right.

I wonder how much time that little girl spends in front of television. Our culture ceratinly provides lots of encouragement for imageries of violence (not to mention women as playthings, children as sex objects, etc)… when it works for advertisers, the connect often seems absent. Kids ARE impressionable… adults are advertisers, consumers and entertainment addicts… the two don't always mix. And kids don't get images of guns in their heads out of nowhere.

Personally, I feel there's something less than entirely healthy about a four-year-old sketching guns with some idea in mind that links daddy and his gun with killing bad guys and monsters, like this might be a handy way of dealing with fears and obstacles. No? Me hysterical? Okay… your world… what's a few more gunshots anyway? Especially in the head of a four-year-old? 

(Oddly, the father had some unspecified encounters with the cops in Toronto before they moved — pure coincidence.)

We move more and more to an Orwellian society. An "arrest first and investigate later" society (if we bother to investigate at all). We arrest not only for crimes but for "maybe crimes".  The government has more and more power to grab any citizen and hold them indefitely without even charging them.

All the while talking out of the other side of their gob about individual rights and due process and all that jazz. One of the things being that people are assumed innocent until proven guilty.

We have long spent more for the state to prosecution a defendant than the state to defend one.

We want more prisons and less cops. We want more powers to arrest and less to acquit. 

We want there to be no permission for a wiretap, no search warant, no charged or let go rules, there be no need for a body.... there be no need for even a trial...

We want people accused of certain crimes arrested first and then we will worry about the law...  Heck, change the law...

As long as we keep telling the powers that be that we want this, that we will fund this, that we will accept this... it will be exactly what we get.

My kids all drew at least one picture that included a gun.  My kids rarely watched tv (maybe twice a month and only a program approved by both parents). 

I wouldn't want to say anything against this man and his family based on the amount of information available.

The reaction of the school seems a bit over the top though (based on the information received).  I would be hesitant about having a child of mine in a school that doesn't communicate with the students (and parents) and where the staff doesn't understand the normal stages of child development - that includes violent drawings.

I tend not to blame TV. Back before TV's were in most houses or movies could be gone to, kids heard radio  characters like Dick Tracy and The Cisco Kid... there was Gunsmoke, Hopalong Cassidy, The Avenger, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers... and there were kids playing they were  Lucky Luciano and Dillinger...  they were Davy Crockett and Billy the Kid...

Kids draw pictures of zebras and dinosaurs never having seen one and they can draw a picture with guns in it without seeing them.

I grew up in New Zealand without television and without gun awareness — though my dad had been a Second World War hero (commissioned in the field, Military Cross, etc) until I got called up for military training. Boy violence was mostly about sport (rugby) and wrestling and, sometimes, punching. In our late pre-teen, early teen years, "rich" kids picked up some cowboy imagery from movies and comics; otherwise, it was thrird- and fourth-hand copies of "war comics" that got passed around and, where we mostly had dads who'd been overseas in "the War" (WW2) and many of them wounded, I remember the war comic imagery being mocked, derided and scorned by veteran dads (many of whom binned the comics… our comics always had a very short circulation life… and it was almost exclusively a "boy" thing as I recall. I don't think we ever felt deprived.  And, a few suicidal nutbars excluded,  gun crime is realtively recent in New Zealand. It was with a certain amount of controversy that a special-callout "armed offenders squad" was finally trained and put together in around 1964…until then — certainly through the 20th century — police never carried firearms. Firearms were for hunting and pest eradication.

Here's a relevant link:

http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2012/02/28/piers-bill-maher-guns....

Does Canada lean this way? To me, it seems to… 

don't worry; adults are impressionable as well. welcome to the united church of the USA;

it makes sense, the US market is far bigger than the Canadian market...

What IS the attraction?

Guns are inherently ugly, inherently brutal, they are dangerous and dirty pices of technology…  and they are noisy and destrctive (and smelly) when they're fired.

They exist simply to kill.

I say that having been trained as a gunnery rating in the New Zealand Navy. There was a time when I could strip down and reassemble a Bofors gun in fairly short order: nip your thumb doing that bucketing around on a cold morning at sea and it hurt like hell!

We also did boring stuff with smallarms, and I found nothing alluring in the experience. They take remarkably little skill, fitness or intelligence to use and the consequences of doing so can be horrendous.

And they are not especially useful close-up for self-defence. We were taught that, if someone points a gun at you with intent, the idea is to get as close as possible, ideally so the wepon's pressed against you so you can read the emotions of the person threatening you. Then you choose your moment and smash the gunman in the nose (iinstant blindness, before the guy's reflexes reach his trigger finger), then you get the gun pointed away from you and kick his privates up to his throat. Then, when he goes down, you are supposed to tread very hard on his face or the back of his head, whichever's uppermost.

Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be seen with a gun by anyone who'd been trained to do that. Of course, he can always shoot you from a safe distance but shooters often miss because they tend to be nervous. And, if he does get you, he often kills himself as well and, if he doesn't, he's likely to face some very awkward questions and some loss of liberty.

The whole thing is kind of weird… 

MikePaterson,

As an ex-pat, I spent about three decades in the midst of the obsession and amongst the obsessed. The propoganda is everywhere almost from birth.

As a child, toy guns are some of the first toys. It is intergenerational because BB guns and popcans or pinned on sheriff badges are a part of the grandparents and parents memory bank and pysche. If children do not have plastic or metal simulators they will use their own fingers to form guns and shoot.

The good guys versus bad guys... cops and robbers... "stick 'em up" and "put your hands up"... soldiers... plastic little green men toting guns and saving the world and always good.

It is the lasting bloodline of a people, their blood running through cold steel. Their genealogical stories are of armed blacksmiths overtaking an empire and frontiersmen taming the wild west.

Their history, the one they learn in schools, moves from one armed endeavour to another. Revolution (and the paperwork), War of 1812 (paperwork), time fighting Indians (maps and paperwork), Civil War, shooting of the President, more fighting Indians... The history of the world is the same, one armed conflict to the next.

Before any fear or math and logic can get to you that it is highly unlikely anyone is going to have to defend their home, it is vaporized by the Second Amendment. Anyone knows the US would be Britain if people did not have guns. They have freedom of religion because of guns and war against Britain. They have freedom of speech because they have to let you say what you want when you have a gun. Your government is not an evil despot, like the whole rest of the world, because you have guns.

The tales are cleaned up. Do not frighten the children. One of the first stories of Valley Forge soldiers, they were just on a boat with a blanket over their shoulders. Do not talk about dysentery and pneumonia and typhoid or any thing... can't scare the children of diseases. The starving horses would upset the children too. The tales can have no pools of blood and guts... they cannot even have death without blood and gore....nobody says when they win or they lose there are dead bodies (that comes later)

Once you learn that guns mean death, blood, guts... it is too late. You already know they are all that has ever saved you, all that ever will...

Sad.

Propaganda.

"your country right or wrong"

"if you ain't with us, you're against us"

"love her or leave her".....

Those who do not swallow what they are force fed...  they are uneducated wimps, commie pinko tree huggers ...traitors...

Or they immigrate  =)

The effect of a gunshot on flesh and bone is far from simple and the impacts of a non-fatal hit are typically widespread and long-lasting. Bones shatter; soft tissue is shredded and emulsified. Shock can do its own severe damage to vital organs. 

We were in Scotland at the time of the Dunblane primary school massacre — a former Scout leader and shopkeeper walked into the school with four legally owned pistols and killed 15 5-6 year-olds, a teacher and himself. Scotland is close-knit and "small" and the outrage and pain were very deeply felt.

Three years later, after a lot of equivocation, debate and deferred decisons, the British Government finally banned handguns.

Semi-automatic rifles and shotguns with more than three-round magazines had already been banned after the "Hungerford Massacre" in England that claimed15-16 lives — with legally owned and licensed weapons.

In Britain, guns are most visible in the hands of a few hardcore criminal gangs… and Royalty and their "toff" pals who get their kicks shooting deer and little birds in the wild and remoter parts of England and Scotland and are widely loathed for it.

Fox hunting with hounds was banned in Scotland in 2003 on the grounds of animal cruelty and a couple of years later in teh rest of Britain. It's been tricky to enforce but the general British concern for animal welfare and gun control  seems to me a benchmark for civilised living.

[quote=SG]

The tales are cleaned up. Do not frighten the children. One of the first stories of Valley Forge soldiers, they were just on a boat with a blanket over their shoulders. Do not talk about dysentery and pneumonia and typhoid or any thing... can't scare the children of diseases. The starving horses would upset the children too. The tales can have no pools of blood and guts... they cannot even have death without blood and gore....nobody says when they win or they lose there are dead bodies (that comes later)

quote]

Recently my husband and I have been watching some old 'classic' movies - movies from our childhood.   I can't believe the violence and the killing.   And how casually it is done.   Shoot and an Indian falls backward of a horse and lays still.  No blood and guts.  No sorrowing wife and children left without protection to starve.  Shoot and kill - the bad guy sneaking around the roof tops - get a good shot away, watch him fall and roll down to fall off the varanda roof.  Move on to shoot the guy in the window, and the other one hiding behind a barrel.   But no remorse, not second guessing, no coming to the realization that this was a living, breathing, loving human being who is dead.  

As for the damage done by a bullet wound.  It can't be bad.   Grab the wounded spot, tie a bandana around it, and carry on riding and shooting.  

And you are right - there is no sickness, no hunger, no suffering as a result of fighting.   Somehow there is always a campfire with a roast on a spit - or a pretty girl in the kitchen 'rustling up some grub' for the handsome cowboy whose hat is still clean and white and whose bandana is always neatly tied around his neck (no longer needed as a bandage).

I think it's "cultural" and ties in with my notions on people follow what is meaningful (where we create meaning out of 'nothing') as opposed to truthful.

I've investigated why someone would really like guns and while I don't share their sentiments I can grok intellectually & emotionally why.

(have you ever tried to see something you value or find beautiful and see if you can, for even just a moment, see it as ugly or valueless?)

I could go further into pop culture, which does a good job, I think, in dealing with desire and look at the difference between, say, US pop culture and, say, British pop culture.  Y'wanna see American spirituality?  Go to Disneyland or Las Vegas -- Las Vegas are where their G_ddesses & G_ds parade and where they do just like people of ye olde time religions did -- their Deities were ideals to follow/dance to/chant the chants to, a kind of sympathetic magick.

Or something like that.

armed and cute

coming soon to a yacht near you

say hello to our future robot overlords

hilaritas is the true Deity ruling planet Dirt

remember, always wear protection when hunting mythical creatures such as sasquatch, athiest, or normal human being

and remember to, when given a choice, be racist and buy Canadian :3

watch mathematics and physics unfold in these gorgeous displays

Not too fond of viewing blood and gore myself but this war clip is cool I think.

kaythecurler wrote:

Not too fond of viewing blood and gore myself but this war clip is cool I think.

 

=player embedded

*giggle* good one, kaythecurler :3

Glad you enjoyed it.  I think it is incredibly clever.

This is over the top.  So keep the kids away from the internet, tv, movies, school, other kids so they don't draw a gun, condom, or other type of weapon and childrens services will think its the parent.

(I LOVED that record)

I'm no fan of guns or gun culture. I also have a great deal of skepticism about the degree of government interference in some areas of life. 

Having said that, I think it's also wise to be aware that the media don't always get it right, that sometimes there is part of the story that can't be told. For example, if there is a child protection issue that the teacher had been asked to keep an eye on, that's not something that an agency can go public with, in their own defense. 

I also think that Ontario's system of child protection that involves the CAS system of agencies, all of whom are unaccountable, could stand an overhaul. I think there are other provinces that work similarly and they're in the same boat. How is it possible that they operate without government oversight when they function on government's behalf?

Here's some more info to the story:

http://news.sympatico.ctv.ca/home/waterloo_police_apologize_to_dad_after_strip_search/6b50dbe2

Here's one example of why I don't own a firearm

Definitely not disabled

Too cool

Can't forget this classic

Just like in real life, buy one for the whole family

new zealanders are awesome

"Daddy has a gun to shoot monsters"

Really??????  This is a four year old who probably believes in the Smurfs and puff the Magic Dragon and Barney.

There needs to be more evidence than to traumitize the family like this.

When I was four I believed my Dad could lift up the house with one hand like Hercules.  I probably drew such a picture and told my teacher.  Most kids believe their Dads are superheroes.

The idiots involved in this search should be charged.