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xdfanatic wrote:I personally would recommend your husband trying IWB carry or OWB with a retention strap for events like this. Also he might try a pocket weapon for something with a little more retention than the two mentioned. I am just not a big fan of the shoulder rig as I have had my fair share of problems with that setup but YMMV.
Btw it's great seeing more responsible younger folks CHL'ing, I think you guys handled the situation well. I don't think your CCW should prohibit any sort of activities or fun especially with the right setup unless otherwise prohibited. Glad your fair experience was fun and didn't end disastrously.
Xd

He has an IWB holster but he finds it very uncomfortable. He was wearing a second carry OWB on his hip in addition to his shoulder carry.

It's funny because we've never had a problem like that before...but then again, he's never given a piggyback ride while wearing it, either! We still can't recreate the problem so I suppose we have to chalk this one up to a freak accident.

Thanks for the compliment! I've been surprised to discover more of my peers on campus who have CHLS or are CHL-supportive. It makes me glad, because at my liberal college I'd think my husband and I were the only ones!

boatbroke wrote:When I took my CHL class, I was told that it was illegal to carry in a sporting event. I would consider the state fair to be a sporting event and is therefore illegal to carry there.

It is for this exact reason that I didn't carry when I was there Saturday.

Eh? The State Fair has a sign posted that say CHLers just have to check in with the PD upon entering. Why on Earth would it be considered a professional sporting event?

To the devil's advocate: We drank AFTER the fair, and we did make sure that all firearms were secured in the car. The trip was planned a week in advance; our schedules allow us free time only after 4:30 pm so we knew we'd be hanging out after the fair in order to make the trip more worthwhile.

...and said friend is absolutely insane. I don't know what the heck he was thinking...piggyback rides, sheesh. But then again, we are all in our 20s, so we're still lively and crazy at times. ;)

mgood wrote:On a side note, it makes you think about retention. A bucket attached to your hip, into which you dump your gun, might be secure enough for standing around. At the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're doing gymnastics, you'd obviously need something a bit more secure. You say this holster holds the gun fairly tight, "retention strap that requires a large amount of force to open." I'd probably get home and experiment (with a triple-checked empty gun) with bumping it from different directions to see if I could recreate the situation (over carpet or something so I wouldn't cause further damage). Maybe it's just one of those freak things that couldn't happen again in a hundred years. But you should evaluate that and make sure.

Because it was a shoulder rig, I think it was more at risk for falling out than a hip holster -- at least in this scenario with the piggyback ride. I'm thinking it was a freak accident because we did test it once hubby woke up this morning. The only explanation we can come up with is that perhaps the strap just wasn't secured as it should have been. There is only one way the secured strap could have been snapped open without intent - the supporting strap would have had to be stationary while the gun in the holster was twisted towards his body. That scenario is impossible because the gun is snug up against his side; there's no room to allow twisting of the holster.

Then again, he carried it around all day before the fair and if the strap was, indeed, not secured...well, I suspect we would have had a problem before the fair. Regardless of why it happened, it makes us more aware of possible scenarios and how to prevent them!

drjoker wrote:Your hubby must be the Hulk or Arnie's long lost brother because he was giving an Adult Friend a piggy-back ride. I can't even give my skinny wife a piggy back ride for more than 10 seconds...!

He's a large strong guy (weighs almost 300 lbs) and his friend isn't (weighs around 130 lbs and looks like a stick) so it wasn't a lot of weight for him to carry around. And I agree with PJK; piggy back rides shouldn't be offered while he's carrying, for the simple reason that an accident like described in my OP can happen very easily. I was actually surprised he even said okay to the piggy back ride since even I don't get those.

Internal SA is something he usually takes into account and something that I will need to develop once I get my license. I'm already planning out how to physically interact with others when they want a hug or think it would be cool to pick me up since I'm so tiny, and how to avoid being "made" when I carry at work due to the amount of back/side/hip patting that goes on. I work as a waitress so we often touch others' torsos to announce our presence and prevent fast movements. I think I'm going to have to use some deep concealment at work; if anyone "makes" me while carrying like that, they'll have a lot more to worry about that discovering I have a gun.

The look on hubby's face when he heard the CLUNK was this -->
But he calmly kept walking and trusted the friend to pick it up. The external SA was definitely working great for our group, and I suspect everyone's internal SA will get better as a result of this accident. Just as it took them a while to learn not to bug-eye when they accidentally "made" him, it may take this group a while to change the way they physically interact with him. This group of friends likely won't ask for piggy back rides anymore and my hubby likely won't give them, either. It was a good learning experience and didn't come at a high cost - that's the best kind.

So a few friends invited us to go to the State Fair tonight. It was a two hour drive for us and we only left our home at around 5pm. Obviously this left us with only a little over 2 hours to wander the park once we got down there, but we decided to go anyway.

Hubby double-packed; he wore his Taurus PT92 in his shoulder rig as well as his S&W 581 in a fanny pack. He joked that he was double-packing since I couldn't carry (I'm still waiting on my plastic). He was escorted to the PD station at the entrance where the officer requested his ID and then sent him on his way. We stuffed our faces with fried foods and then rode the ferris wheel. It had been an uneventful night.

So one of his friends is kind of goofy and wanted a piggy back ride on the way from the ferris wheel to the gate. Hubby said, "Hop on," and the friend promptly jumped on his back. When hubby hoisted the friend up higher on his back, something hit his shoulder rig the wrong way and there was a sudden *clackclackCLUNK* on the ground. We still don't quite understand what happened since the rig has a very stiff retention strap that requires a large amount of force to open, and the readjustment of the piggy back-er shouldn't have been enough force in the correct direction to unsnap the strap.

Anyway, I turned around as hubby simultaneously stepped over the fallen handgun and dropped the friend from his back. The friend seamlessly stooped the pick up the gun as he slid off hubby's back, and then promptly stuffed it under hubby's arm, under his concealment vest. Our group of 5 kept walking as though nothing had happened, with the exception of a few snickers from me and the friend. I was mostly laughing because there were many other people around who didn't notice a dang thing, and the friend was so smooth about fixing the problem. We stopped a little while down the road so he could reholster - there were no open buildings to duck in to for privacy, as it was past closing time, so we formed a sort of human shield around him so passerby wouldn't be able to discern his exact actions.

Everyone in the group knew he was carrying, as they are all very close friends of ours. I was very impressed that no one made a big deal about it being dropped, so attention was never drawn to what happened. A security guard was walking towards us at about 30 feet away when it happened and she didn't even bat an eye. I don't think she noticed AT ALL!

The gun has some moderate scuffing on the slide, which makes hubby a little sad; still, the damage to the gun could be much worse, as could have been the situation had someone noticed and yelled "He's got a gun!" while a security person was in close proximity.

I told him immediately after this happened that I would be posting this here. It's the first time anything like this has happened to us, and it went as well as could be hoped for: no AD, no ordeal, and very little reaction to the dropped gun by everyone in the vicinity, including those in our group.

Since my plastic should be here next week, today was an important lesson for me. I learned firsthand that passerby are very unobservant, and that you can drop a gun on the ground with a loud "clunk" without drawing attention to yourself! Of course, if I drop that new 1911 of mine on jagged concrete, I might just cry...