Using Police Against Your Ex

A guy was arrested for having a BB gun in his hand while his daughter sat on his lap.

Yeah.  That's right.  Just holding a gun while holding a baby is apparently a criminal offense in Ohio.  The guy isn't pointing the gun at his baby.  He's not even got his finger on the trigger.

"Police told the station that the close proximity of the child to the gun in the photo is cause for concern."

Read that again.  The offense was having a gun - which turned out to not even be a real, bullet-shooting gun, but was a BB gun - in "close proximity" to a child.  Did the cops who came in to arrest him check their guns at the door lest they, too, have a gun in "close proximity" to the baby?

If you read the articles the Fox news site links to, you find that the mother of this baby - who obviously is now on the outs with the father - saw the picture on facebook and called cops about it.  Aaahhh, so that's it.  A woman wanting to stick it to her ex lover decided to use the cops as her weapon.  They responded and arrested the guy.

If they didn't, and it had turned out to be a real gun and the baby ended up dead or wounded, folks would scream about cops not doing their job.  At this point, they had few alternatives.  They can't go out and say "The mother's complaints meant we had to do something and we'd rather get bad press for being overly protective than for not being protective enough, so we made the arrest and figured we'd let the judge sort out their mess."

Given the constraints under which police operate, that's a rational conclusion, I guess, but in covering that up (not politically correct) they introduced this novel and dangerous concept - mere "close proximity" to a weapon is now sufficient reason to charge somebody with child endangerment/neglect/abuse.  At least it is if you're a Black guy with a pissed off girlfriend in one of Cincinnati's northern suburbs.

But this guy did nothing wrong and the charges should be dismissed.