On Monday, September 6 at around 11 in the morning, Daniel Arnold needed to poop and proceeded to a bathroom at the W Broadway Walmart in Columbia. At some point, the “long-barreled .410 pistol” he was concealing went off, damaging the floor of the bathroom and landing Mr. Arnold in jail for both his complete failure as a gun owner and his status as a felon in possession of a firearm. In the interest of keeping things positive, I guess we should congratulate Mr. Arnold on managing to somehow conceal an enormous, 4.2 lb. handgun long enough to make it into the Walmart bathroom. We are certainly glad that no one — including Mr. Arnold — was injured.
The serious thing about all this is that public bathrooms are one of the most common places for negligent discharges to occur. In addition to bathroom activity often resulting in a negligent discharge, it also commonly results in a firearm abandoned in the bathroom. For those of us who carry a concealed weapon, figuring out what to do about the bathroom and practicing managing your gun in the bathroom are both extremely important.
I’m not going to give you any specific strategy, but I will give you some recommendations:
First off, obviously, use a holster. If you aren’t using a holster, please, please for the love of all that is decent and good, get a holster that works for you and your weapon. Make sure that the holster you choose does a good job of retaining that weapon. It might end up upside-down in the bathroom and you need the gun to stay in there if that happens. If you’re choosing between a holstering option that can stay in place when you use the bathroom and one that cannot, and there’s no strong reason to pick either one, go with the one that makes it safer to use the bathroom. Finding a holster that works is actually pretty hard, so don’t delay — make this your top priority.
Second: If your rig requires that you remove the gun from your person to sit on a toilet, don’t remove the gun from the holster; instead, remove the entire rig from your person. We don’t want that trigger to ever be exposed unless it is appropriate to pull it.
Third: If you are going to remove the entire rig, make sure you can’t accidentally leave it in the bathroom. Maybe put it in your pants, right in front of you, where you can see it and can’t really leave without noticing it.
Fourth: Let’s make sure people don’t see your gun. Most people are going to be alarmed if they see it, and some people are going to decide to try to steal it from you. So, however you decide to deal with your gun in the bathroom, please make an effort to make sure it stays concealed despite the weird way public restroom dividers are made in the US.
Last: Practice using the toilet with your gun in the safety and privacy of your own home (if you have one). Just like every other aspect of living with a firearm, practice is what creates safe and effective habits, and that practice needs to be done in the safest place possible for you and everyone else in your community.
Here is a related video: