When a child protective service worker went to interview Jamie Gilt’s young son about shooting his mother, they handed him a coloring book.
They talked about injuries. They talked about going to the doctor.
That’s when the 4-year-old began to spin the yarn about what happened on that day in March as Jamie Gilt drove along in Putnam County. He unbuckled his booster seat, hopped down on the floorboard, grabbed his mother’s pistol from under the front seat and shot her.
But the little boy’s story wasn’t so straightforward. He told the child protective worker that it was Tyrannosaurus Rex that shot Jamie Gilt and had help from a Velociraptor. He was adamant, according to a recently obtained case file on the shooting of Jamie Gilt, that he wasn’t in the truck with the dinosaurs and his mother, a run-rights advocate from Jacksonville, on that fateful day.
That day, March 8, would launch the 31-year-old from obscurity to infamy as people across the nation and around the world argued about gun restrictions and gun rights.
Six months after the shooting, Gilt can’t seem to escape the infamy. This week her name bubbled up again.
On Tuesday,
Gilt announced on Facebook that she would like to be a gun-safety instructor.
“I have chosen to take this very negative and scary experience and make something positive out of it. I have gone through a lot of training since the accident, and am nowhere near finished. I realize that many of the classes offered are seriously lacking and I plan to do my best to improve that. 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,” Gilt wrote.
“I think the first thing you do is take down this site and stop associating your name with “Gun Sense.” Until then you deserve all the ridicule that the internet can deliver,” wrote a poster on Facebook.
On Wednesday, not long after a story about the post first appeared on jacksonville.com, the post had been taken down.
Gilt has tried in the past to erase activity on her Jamie Gilt for Gun Sense Facebook account even though some 85,000 people shared the story of the gun-loving mom being shot by her own son.
What’s left behind is this:
“My right to protect my child with my gun trumps your fear of my gun,” Gilt posted in February.
There was a comment she posted the day before the shooting, when she explained that all her children shoot and how her 4-year-old “gets jacked up to target shoot with the .22.”
The account was reactivated in late July, shortly after prosecutors decided she would no longer face jail time for failing to secure her gun from her child.
“If you’re testing the waters to see if its safe to start littering your hypocrisy all over social media again, I can tell you right now, the answer is no.”
Gilt responded that she wasn’t testing the waters and that if the poster didn’t agree with what she puts on her page, he should feel free to unfollow her or refrain from commenting.
The July poster responded this way: “No thanks. Somebody has to keep an eye on the children.”
Ridicule of Gilt has come from around the world.
“I presume you’re going to rename this page now? Jamie Gilt’s impractical gun keeping would be more apt. Whatever you do, lose the ’sense” bit as you clearly have none,” wrote another Facebook poster from the United Kingdom a day after Gilt was shot.
Jamie Gilt, gun advocate shot by her 4-year-old son, remains infamous six months later
for providing update, from 6mo after the Mar. 2016 shooting.
