Lynda Waddington of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa Gazette is lucky to be alive after her recent encounter with a concealed handgun carrier.

No, he didn’t draw or even touch his firearm, or even say anything to her. For that matter, she didn’t even see so much as a gun or a holster, so we aren’t even sure they exist.

She merely saw a bulge in a random man’s jacket that might be a gun, and worked herself into a hysterical fit:

 There’s a mantra quickly repeating in my head: “Please have a badge. Please have a badge. Please have a badge.” It’s a steady heartbeat as I begin a conversation with a shop clerk and reposition myself so I can peer over her shoulder.

I’ve already seen the bulge in his jacket, and it’s clear from the size and shape that he has a holstered gun. Now my eyes are quickly scanning, hoping to find a law enforcement badge clipped to his belt.

I’m in a local bookstore and there’s a sticker near the door asking patrons not to carry weapons on the premises. My two children scurried off the moment we entered, each in search of their own treasures.

The man with the weapon is as interested with the bookstore patrons as he is with the books on display. I’ve watched him watch others. The way he tracks them is unnerving.

I do not know this man, have no knowledge of his profession, personality or character. I am unaware of his mental state, of why he feels the need to carry a weapon into a bookstore. Frankly, I’m not that interested in his reasons right now. My mind is too busy filtering through the various scenarios that could be taking place. They flick before me like movie trailers, and I watch, casting some aside and mentally marking others for further consideration.

There’s no badge — at least not one I can see. And my inspection of him has not gone unnoticed. I rotate my handbag so that more of it rests toward the front of my body and gently pat it. It’s a tell by women who are packing heat in their purse. Many do it without thinking, a subtle check of hard steel through the leather. My touch is greeted by the bristles on my hairbrush, but no one else knows that.

The man recognizes the gesture, his eyes briefly flicking to my own before he moves past us in the aisle.

I still don’t know him, and the movie trailers increase. He could be the stalker, searching for his mark. He could be contemplating a robbery, or seeking someone to abduct. He could be an off-duty police officer, or even one that is undercover. He could be paranoid, thinking the world is out to get him or knowing someone truly is. He could be a fugitive, a drug dealer, a rapist or the owner of a sporting goods store…

Mrs. Waddington then grabbed her children and fled the store, her fantasies having overwhelmed her rationality.

This is quite the revealing article, isn’t it? Waddington didn’t even see a gun, she just saw a “bulge” that could have been a pair of gloves or a checkbook and let her imagination run wild in some perverse paranoid fantasy.

It seems to me that she should switch to decaf… as a start.

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Personally, I’ve made “guess who’s carrying?” into something of a game when I’m out in public.

In any sufficiently large crowd I’ve got a decent shot of spotting someone carrying a concealed weapon. I tend to “make” someone about once a month, with proof typically being the tattletail J-hook of an IWB holster, or simply knowing that a certain concealed carry purse is model “X” from holster company “Y.”

Unlike Waddington, I’m not vain or delusional enough to claim the Holmesian power to deduce that a random bulge under a jacket is confirmation of a handgun.

There wasn’t any doubt about the last guy I “made” in the checkout line at my local grocery store, however. I saw the bottom of his kydex OWB holster peaking out from beneath a too-short jacket when he walked by previously, and when he bent forward to retrieve an item from the bottom of the cart at checkout, his jacket fell open for just an instant, but still long enough for me to recognize a Glock with factory sights that he carried on his hip.

“Score!” I thought, pleased with my observational skills. Then I started putting the items from my cart on the conveyor belt, and promptly forgot about him.

So why is it that the faint possibility of a concealed handgun was enough to cause Mrs. Waddington to feel threatened enough to flee a perfectly ordinary day at a bookstore, while I felt merely amused after I was able to establish that a man in front of me was armed beyond the shadow of a doubt?

Frankly, it’s  a matter of knowledge and maturity… and possibly sanity.

There are well over eleven million citizens in the United States with licensed concealed weapons in the United States, and that doesn’t include the six states where carry is allowed without any permits at all.  I know as a factual matter that concealed carriers are more law-abiding than the average citizens. I also know that firearms aren’t talismans that turn their owners into killers.

I know that a bookstore is an unlikely location for a fugitive drug dealing rapist sporting goods store owner, and I have the maturity to not let my imagination get the better of me.

I know that there is nothing to fear.

Lynda Waddington, however, is Walter Mitty in a dress, an exaggerator clearly prone to self-absorption and hysterical drama (as some of her other writing abundantly confirms). She claims to know all about “tells by women who are packing heat in their purse,” even though such a tell exists only in her fevered brain or conjured up from some bad romance novel she’d previously read.

Waddington rails against laws that allow Iowans to carry concealed weapons to defend themselves against the dangerous and crazy among us.

Perhaps if she wasn’t so clearly deranged herself, she wouldn’t feel so threatened.

Update: Oh, this story just keeps getting better and better.

The comments were down on the story yesterday, but appear to have reappeared overnight… and they include a very interesting comment from a man who claims to be the man Waddington was so sure was a concealed carrier.

Yeah… not exactly.

As Mr. Williams notes, a Holter monitor is a device worn to continuously record heart rhythms over a 24-48 hour period, and they  look like this (below). They do not remotely resemble a firearm, and most variants resemble something between an old-school cassette player and a home thermostat.

If Mr. Williams is indeed the man Waddington saw in the bookstore as he claims to be, then this article is precisely what we suspected it to be… a paranoid rant from a woman prone to flights of fantasy that border upon being dangerous.