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randomoutburst wrote: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...