A building contractor who was renovating rooms at an extended-stay hotel in Columbia, Tennessee had his pistol taken from an unsecured toolbox while he was working, reports Kara Coleman in The Daily Herald, and so far, it doesn’t sound like he’s gotten it back. “The contractor, Donnie Rosenbaum, said an unloaded Keltic (sic) .380-caliber pistol (hey, at least she got the caliber right) was in his unsecured toolbox in his room at the motel on Nashville Highway, according to a Columbia Police Department report. Rosenbaum’s son said he saw one of Rosenbaum’s employees take the handgun because Rosenbaum’s 13-year-old nephew was present and he did not want the teen having access to it.” . . .

Rosenbaum “stated he was not upset, as far as (the employee) trying to keep it away from the child,” the report stated.

The employee allegedly told police that he did take the handgun from Rosenbaum’s toolbox while the minor was present. He said he put it in his pocket and continued working in the building, according to the report. Rosenbaum was unaware that his employee had the pistol, so he called police and reported it missing.

The employee then “saw a police car coming into the parking lot, where he remembered he had the pistol in his back pocket, and put it in a sack of garbage,” according to the report. He allegedly told officers he is not supposed to be in possession of a firearm and “did not want to get into trouble,” the report stated.

The trash bin at the motel was searched by Rosenbaum’s employees, but a bag containing a pistol was never found, according to the report

I hope it’s not too ungenerous of me to say that Mr. Rosenbaum wouldn’t have had any trouble with keeping his firearm out of the hands of children or away from the sticky fingers of whomever currently has possession of it if he’d been carrying it in a secure on-body holster. It sounds like we’re probably talking about a Kel-Tec mousegun here. A $10 pocket holster would have sufficed.

Or, for that matter, since the firearm wasn’t even in the same room as its owner for an extended period of time, leaving it at home in a secure location also would have been almost as effective in terms of self defense. It would have been equally inaccessible if Mr. Rosenbaum had needed it with seconds to spare in extremis. Just a thought.

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52 COMMENTS

  1. Fortunately, the gun was a .380 and not a .9mm. Or even worse, one of those soul-destroying .45 calibers.

    It’s also fortunate that the employee was barred from possession of a gun, so he dumped it in the garbage. Suuuuure he did.

    • I wouldn’t want to nit pick you Ralph, but a “point” nine mm might be too small to cause much damage!

      • Get with the program, Gunr! The Lamestream Media is always reporting on the ferocious .9mm. And sometimes the even more deadly 38mm revolver! 🙂

        • So true. The other day it was reported on the radio news that TSA recovered “a loaded Glock 19 millimeter pistol” at Nashville International.. either the reporter got it wrong, the writer got it wrong, or most unsettling, the TSA agent had no idea what he recovered. Either way I face palmed in the car.

        • Didn’t mean to be critical, just poking fun at you.
          That 38mm revolver is pretty close to the 40mm we had on our ship, during the Korean “argument”

  2. It wasn’t “off body carry”. It sounds like the man was storing it in his tool box while he worked. A pistol in your pocket is not conducive to doing physical labor. His chances of needing to defend himself while actively working at remodeling hotel rooms is somewhere between slim and none.

    When I took my Colt Mustang out of my pocket and placed it on my work bench while I was attaching a snow blade to an ATV, I was not “off body” carrying it. I was choosing not to lay on a pistol while I was stretched out on the garage floor.

    • It sounds like Mr. Rosenbaum didn’t need a pocket holster so much as he needed a toolbox he could lock.

      And you’re right, there are lots of kinds of work that are really uncomfortable with a gat strapped to you. I suspect most of TTAG’s primary contributors don’t spend much time wearing a toolbelt or rolling around on a mechanic’s creeper, or they’d know that on-body carry isn’t always possible.

    • “It wasn’t “off body carry”. It sounds like the man was storing it in his tool box while he worked.”

      This, but its yummy click-bait

  3. Did we arrest the “unable to possess” guy when he admitted he took the gun? Or when he admitted that he knew he was breaking the law and then tampered with evidence?

    Sorry I forgot. Because guns.

  4. Um I thought a purse, backpack, or something like that is off body. Not a tool box.

      • Too bad he didn’t lock the tool box. That said, on body carry isn’t the “end all” either given the circumstance so get over yourself. Sometimes on a construction sight, anything that don’t need to be on your body can be a major safety hazard and not just a gun, even a cell phone. Same thing wrenching under a jeep or atv. Then again some of us on body carry and off body carry at the same time.

      • I disagree. There’s a pretty big distinction between carrying a loaded, ready-for-self-defense weapon in a purse or backpack, and stashing an unloaded gun in a toolbox. The former is obviously a form of carry, but the latter seems more like “piss-poor handgun storage” to me. If you leave a gun in a nightstand drawer, is that also “off-body carry”?

        In any case, I’d be interested to know why the guy is keeping an unloaded gun in his toolbox. We can debate the wisdom of off-body/on-body carry all day long, but I think we all agree that a gun with no ammo is pretty much useless.

  5. “I had control of it the entire time!” …said by every ‘off-body’ carrier up to and including the point they realize their gun is gone.

    • Lame. None of that stuff even remotely counts as evidence of a hoax. just one example: there are literally MILLIONS of straight lines in nature – one of the most common being spider silk anchor lines for spider webs.

  9. Buy a freaking $2 lock. The keltec is so small he could throw it in his back pocket especially unloaded.

  10. Who’s more foolish, the guy with an unsecured weapon at a work site, or someone who construes that this was carry of any sort. You have to, well, be carrying it….

  11. “off body carry” still means that you are carrying – this case don’t meet the criterion of “carry”. more like, “stupidly off body stashing a gun in an unlocked toolbox”.

    • Why is it stupid? That Kel-Tec was one of the cheapest tools in the toolbox. It was unloaded so it was the safest tool in there as well. But yeah, not an example of “off body carry”.

  13. His biggest problem is that he has a 13 year old nephew that he can’t trust. That’s not only a problem, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

  14. “Or, for that matter, since the firearm wasn’t even in the same room as its owner for an extended period of time, leaving it at home in a secure location also would have been almost as effective in terms of self defense.”

    Umm….

    “The contractor, Donnie Rosenbaum, said an unloaded Keltic (sic) .380-caliber pistol was in his unsecured toolbox IN HIS ROOM at the motel on Nashville Highway”

    Sounds like he’s living at the hotel, so technically it was at his home.

    • That raises even more questions. So was someone just going through his stuff or had he made it known head a firearm in there?

  16. He was storing the firearm, not carrying it.

    The employee’s story sounds fishy. An unloaded firearm was the thing he was concerned with (as a prohibited person no less) but not any of the other potentially dangerous tools around… right. I would demand that he compensate me for the firearm or just flat out fire him.

    • They’re not mutually exclusive. Fire the thief once you’ve been compensated. If I can’t trust you not to steal my shit, I don’t want you on my job site.

  17. Those little kel tecs are hard to keep track of if it’s not on your person, but It’s still a gun and needs to be respected,

  18. We should definitely be blaming the victim, maybe even make him do the thief’s punishment. He has it coming to him, leaving his pistol on the floor of a public hallway like that. Wait. I mean inside of his own tool box with the rest of his tools.

  19. If we are talking about a keltec p3at here there is no excuse for him not to have been carrying it. I remember carrying one in the pocket of my gym shorts all day before remembering it was there. My cell phone on the other hand was annoying me to death in the other pocket. I blame illegal mexicans for this fiasco!

    • Exactly! The P3AT is so incredibly small that there is no excuse for off body carry. That is the precise point with guns like that.

  21. Why does this post sound like an anti-gunner post? I get that some people are REALLY against any way of keeping and bearing arms they don’t like, but aren’t we reaching a little here to say that this in any way implicates the thousands of people who carry “off-body” safely every day?

    Some points:

    – This guy wasn’t carrying. His handgun was stored, but not safely. Thus, this isn’t really an “off-body carry” story.
    – I think we would all agree that tossing a gun in an unlocked toolbox is foolish. Those of us that I know who do carry “off-body” advise a proper bag with a dedicated concealed carry compartment that is both easy to access and retains the firearm.
    – The right to keep and bear arms doesn’t mean only the right to keep and bear arms in a retention holster on a tactical belt. You don’t like how I carry; well, you have the right to remain silent.
    – How many NDs occur from guys carrying off-body vs. guys carrying on-body? I’m not counting, but seems like I hear a lot more about accidents from the latter.

  23. OOOOH, a Keltic pistol! Made by leprechauns, no doubt!

    “A news article about firearms is something with errors in it.”

    Translation: most reporters are idiots who have never held a gun in their lives, and somehow believe they are qualified to write about guns.

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