“As for what happened, yes, I did make a mistake by placing a handgun under the front seat of my vehicle, and that mistake lead to a horrible accident. However, this is not something that is rare. A very large number of people place a gun under their seat every single day, I can only hope that what happened to me will help to open their eyes to what can happen by doing so.”
Off body carry is (per Claude Werner) “not for beginners, although beginners often do it”.
Melody Lauer has an excellent article series on LuckyGunner.com that details the exact pitfalls that off body carry entails.
“The safety was not off. I was not shot with the compact 1911 that was shown in pictures. It was a Springfield Mod 2. That particular handgun does not have a thumb safety.”
NEVER assume that your child is unable to operate your gun.
Jamie Gilt’s four year old son was able to deactivate the Springfield XD Mod. 2 grip safety and while pulling the trigger on his mother’s gun.
“I realize that many of the classes offered are seriously lacking and I plan to do my best to improve that.
- Instructors “don’t know what they don’t know”
- Instructors get lazy and decide to teach the bare minimum
- A segment of customers demand classes that are as short as possible and as inexpensive as possible which drives down the quality of a class if the instructor decides to tailor it to that market.
“I will be teaching classes as soon as I am ready, and I will continue to share my story in hopes that it will help just one person make a different decision or get a little more training.”
RealDefense 
Reblogged this on .
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Reblogged this on Women and Guns and commented:
We are all just human. We don’t know what we don’t know. We must get quality instruction, and continue to train and practice. Learning to operate a gun does not make you safe. This is why we have ALWAYS incorporated 4 hours of personal safety in our Basic Handgun Classes prior to bringing out the guns. People just don’t “get it” until they we teach them the importance of awareness, preparation and legalities of using a gun for self defense. There are many, many seasoned shooters that do not embrace the so called ‘4 rules”. But that is a subject for another article. We added a 5th rule “always properly secure your gun”. Always. It bears further explanation and should not be left to the gun owner to interpret. Instructors need to explain the meaning behind every rule, in every class.
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I think there would be NO better instructor than someone that has already made a stupid mistake.
Courts around the country send drunk drivers to schools to tell their stories of injuring themselves and injuring and killing others while driving under the influence.
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That’s a good point. It really boils down to what the content of any course she teaches would be.
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What you end up with as an anecdotal instructor. A person with ONE bad experience doesn’t make a good instructor. It would make for great story time though.
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I think Jamie might be a very qualified person to teach safety. She’s experienced the downside of not doing it right and it sounds like she’s owning her mistake.
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That’s a fair point. I do think she is learning from her mistake.
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