Yesterday Todd Starnes posted an article at Townhall about an incident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The article reports:

Mrs. Smith’s 7-year-old son had just completed a zoom class from the den of their home when she received an urgent email from her son’s first grade teacher.

It just so happened that the little boy had recently been gifted a toy gun and the child had placed his “new favorite thing” on the table next to the computer.

“Another parent had been very uncomfortable by the fact that the gun had been in view of the zoom call,” Mrs. Smith said on my radio show. “It’s such an innocent thing that someone used to make a judgment and an accusation.”

A few hours after they received the email, there was a knock at the front door. It was the police.

“The police officer came to our door right after breakfast and asked us to step outside of our home as a result of the zoom call,” she told me.

Mrs. Smith’s husband tried to explain to the officer that there were no guns in the house – other than the toy gun that their son had received. 

“He essentially lectured us on child safety and the fact that our children are too young to interact with any guns and weapons,” she said.

The officer said it did not matter that it was a toy gun and he continued to lecture the couple. 

“I said, this is a toy. No one is unsafe in our home. Everyone is safe and well and healthy,” she said. “They took it very seriously as if there was some sort of chance we had weapons in the home.”

The article concludes:

Mrs. Smith said her children were terrified by the police visit.

“They were scared their parents were going to go to jail that day for something that was completely untrue,” she said.

The family was not cited and there were no follow up visits from authorities, but they were definitely shaken by the ordeal.

“What really troubled me was the fact that someone made a claim, an accusation with zero facts,” she said. “It was completely bogus and it left our kids really scared.”

Life is returning to normal for the Smith family, but they have made one important decision regarding education.

“We opted out of zoom calls,” she said.

The German government perfected the process of snitching on neighbors during the 1920s and 1930s – leading up to World World II. It’s horrifying to imagine that such tendencies might exist in modern day America.

There are a lot of disturbing things here. Why didn’t the ‘concerned’ parent just call the parents without getting the police involved? Why were the police concerned about a toy gun–haven’t they got better things to worry about? Has it occurred to anyone that when children grew up playing cops and robbers with guns that there were fewer mass shootings?