A concealed carrier on Reddit said he had been experimenting with a new way of carrying his Ruger LCP when one small mistake in a Walmart parking lot turned into the kind of public drop that makes your stomach hit the ground before the gun does. In the post, he explained that he usually pocket-carried the little pistol in a Sticky holster, but lately had been trying to wear it IWB around the 4-to-5 o’clock position so he could use that pocket for something else. He said he had done it four or five times already without a problem, and the holster had seemed to stay in place exactly the way it was supposed to.
Then came the part he clearly was not expecting. He wrote that he pulled into a Walmart parking space between two other vehicles, got out of the car, and the butt of the gun caught on the door pillar. That snag yanked the pistol right out of the holster. According to the post, the LCP landed flat on its side on the pavement in broad daylight. He said he was lucky to be between his own vehicle and another one, because as far as he could tell no one saw it happen. He quickly picked it up, got back into the car, checked to make sure the gun was okay, and then put it back into his pocket in the holster, which he pointed out had never actually moved from his waistband at all.
What makes the story feel so real is how ordinary the setup was right before it went wrong. He was not in a confrontation, not rushing into a sketchy place, and not doing anything that would sound wild in hindsight. He was just getting out of the car in a parking lot after experimenting with a carry position that had seemed fine the previous few times. That is what gave the post its uneasy edge. The holster itself had not slipped or fallen away. The gun got caught and pulled free by the car. In other words, the failure did not feel random to him after the fact. It felt like one of those things he could suddenly see coming once it was already too late.
He did not try to dodge that point either. In the post, he invited people to “discuss my bone-headedness,” and later admitted in the comments that this was where the bone-head factor really came in. He said he had gotten out of the car too fast because he was in a hurry and already annoyed about having to shop at Walmart. Looking back, he said that if he had slowed down and paid better attention, he might have felt the snag before the pistol fully came out of the holster. He called it a live-and-learn kind of moment.
The comments quickly turned into a mix of joking, gear talk, and practical warnings. One commenter teased him for picking the gun up “to make sure it was okay,” and another jokingly pitied the little pistol itself. But the bigger conversation centered on retention. One person told him he needed better retention and said they had felt guns rise up before but never fully come out. The original poster agreed and replied that he eventually planned to move to something kydex-molded with a larger clip. For the time being, though, he said he was going back to pocket carry, which was the whole reason he bought the LCP in the first place.
He also added one detail that showed what was going through his head the moment the gun hit the pavement. He said this was one of the times he was really glad to own a true double-action-only pistol. He acknowledged that striker-fired handguns have safeties too, but said a true DAO gun gave him extra peace of mind in that kind of situation. The replies spun off into a side conversation about drop safety, striker systems, and personal preference, but that detail helped explain the panic of the moment. He was not just embarrassed. He was also very aware of how bad it could have been if the drop had gone differently.
Another funny piece of the story came out when somebody told him to get a new car. He replied that he actually had three, but on that particular day he had chosen to drive a 1990 Cadillac Brougham because it was probably the last sunny 70-degree day of the year in Wisconsin. He pointed out that it was a four-door car with a huge center door pillar and admitted he should have been paying closer attention, especially since he did not drive that car very often. That detail made the whole thing feel even more specific: not just a parking-lot mishap, but a one-day combination of a small pistol, an improvised carry setup, an old car, and one bad snag at exactly the wrong angle.
By the end, the post read like somebody putting his own embarrassing mistake on display so other carriers could picture exactly how it happened. He did not blame the holster alone, and he did not act like it was some freak accident that could never be repeated. He saw it for what it was: a small carry choice that had worked a handful of times until one ordinary movement exposed the flaw. One second he was stepping out of the car to run into Walmart. The next, his pistol was on the asphalt in broad daylight and he was hoping nobody had seen a thing.
