Worker says he found someone else’s carry gun in a public bathroom at work — and the comments turned into a brutal warning about restroom mistakes

A Reddit user in r/CCW described a workday discovery that could have gone a lot worse if the wrong person had walked into the stall first. He said a manager at his retail job found a 9mm Glock sitting unholstered on the toilet-paper holder in a public bathroom stall during a kids’ event at the store. The poster added that many customers there either open carry or conceal, so a gun on someone’s belt would not have shocked him. What did shock him was finding one left behind, loaded, in a public restroom. The original Reddit thread is here: reddit.com/r/CCW/comments/105v487/somebody_left_their_ccw_in_my_work_public

From the way he told it, the worst part was not just that the gun had been forgotten. It was how exposed the whole thing was. This was not a holstered pistol tucked somewhere obscure or a magazine dropped under a sink. It was sitting out in plain view on the toilet-paper holder, and he said it had one in the chamber. In a store full of families and children, that detail changes the feel of everything immediately. The next person into that stall could have been anyone.

At first, the poster said the owner had called in and admitted leaving it there, and he added that the man apparently made it all the way home before realizing his holster was empty. Even that version of the story was ugly enough on its own. A person can forget keys, a wallet, or sunglasses and still be seen as absent-minded. Forgetting a loaded handgun in a public restroom lands very differently, especially when the gun is not even in a holster anymore.

Then he updated the post, and the tone got even darker. He said he had been told wrong about the owner calling and that, as far as he now knew, nobody had claimed the gun. That meant the story no longer looked like one terrible mistake followed by a scramble to fix it. It started looking like a loaded pistol had been left in a public bathroom and then simply abandoned. That shift is what made the thread feel less like a blunder and more like something colder and harder to defend.

The poster did not hide how angry he was about it. He wrote that mistakes happen, but that when someone is “that careless with a firearm in public,” especially around little kids, that person should not be carrying. That frustration ran through the whole discussion. This was not a thread full of people giving the unknown gun owner the benefit of the doubt. Most of the energy came from people imagining how bad it could have been if a child had found it first, or if an untrained adult had grabbed it in panic.

The deeper problem in the story was not only the owner’s memory. It was the bathroom routine behind the mistake. Public restrooms are one of the easiest places for concealed carriers to get sloppy. Belts loosen, holsters shift, pants drop lower, and people start improvising because they are in a hurry or trying not to fumble. That is exactly why experienced carriers get so rigid about how they manage a gun in a stall. Once the firearm leaves the body, the chances of leaving it behind go way up. In this case, that risk became very real.

The replies turned quickly into a rough mix of outrage, gallows humor, and very practical carry advice. A lot of commenters said the same basic thing in different words: the safest answer is to keep the gun holstered and physically attached to you the entire time. Some said they keep the whole holstered setup nested between their ankles or inside their clothing so it cannot be set down and forgotten. Others said there is no good reason for the gun to leave the belt at all if the carry method is set up correctly.

People also started sharing their own horror stories, which only made the thread feel more cynical. One commenter mentioned a newer LAPD officer who left his Glock behind at a range counter. Another said he had seen a police chief leave a gun in a restaurant bathroom. Someone else talked about officers realizing after lunch that one of them had left a pistol behind at breakfast. Those stories did not soften the original incident. They made it feel like one more example of a mistake too many gun owners still make in the most preventable place possible.

Underneath all of that, the mood stayed pretty simple. A manager found a loaded, unholstered 9mm Glock on a toilet-paper holder in a public bathroom stall during a kids’ event. Whether the owner called or not, whether he panicked later or never came back at all, the damage to the story was already done. Once a gun is left sitting there for strangers to find, the carrier has already lost control of the one thing he was supposed to keep under control the entire time.