I also want it to be clear to anyone reading here that lawyer who was on speaker phone throughout the incident said the police were nothing but professional throughout. As was stated earlier in the thread (which looks like another thread was merged into it...) the police have to show with the NJ DYFS. There seems to have been no actual violations, the concern is the fact that the DYFS employee was making threats of taking the man's child, and demanding access to the man's gun cabinet to inventory his firearms without a warrant. The situation is further aggravated because the man was treated as guilty before proven innocent by the DYFS (if his son held a scary looking black rifle he MUST have illegal firearms somewhere on the premises) and the DYFS agent not only refused to show proper credentials but to even give a name. The DYFS on the whole (based on the articles I've read) has done nothing more than stonewall, and based on what I've seen any nutjob can make any accusation with absolutely no repercussions.
As far as posting stuff to facebook... I have lots of stuff posted... granted I try to limit my audience on FB as much as possible, but my kids doing stuff gets posted to my facebook so family and friends (who use it as a point to keep up on things with each other) can share and see it.
Obviously, if you post illegal stuff you deserve to get in trouble for it.
In this case, the firearm was a legal firearm, the boy legally able to handle it (and properly trained and so on), there was *NOTHING* illegal, or even wrong, going on from the get-go. You can argue that posting anything online is a bad idea I suppose, but then I have to ask what, exactly, are you doing here?
The problem here isn't the police, and (even if he is a grandstanding idiot, who may have been inebriated during the encounter) not the father. (You don't have to like him, and being drunk is still legal, at least he had the presence of mind to get his lawyer on the phone during the encounter, I have to wonder if I'd have had the presence of mind to do that.) The problem, as the story is presented at this point, is the NJ DYFS agent. One, I have a hard time believing that someone doing something legal (even safe) is, in most cases, a case for DYFS to come pounding on a door late one evening. Two, if the agent doesn't have to identify themselves, and the accuser can be anonymous, and even if not there is no recourse against the accuser there is some pretty serious issues here. The DYFS agent could have investigated the situation is a more tactful, way (assuming that they do indeed have to investigate everything). Showing up after dark with police in tow just isn't the way this should have been handled.