Kids Do Change Things...
...BC (before children) it didn't matter much. But with them around greater care has to be taken, and so here is what works for us.
We Eddie Eagle-ized them very early on. In addition, and every so often, we do the "gun drill" where I deliberately leave an air soft pistol laying out at random and when they find it/see it do the "stop, don't touch, leave the area, tell an adult" thing. They are super kids and work well with the training. We're in a community with a very high percentage of gun ownership, so my assumption is that when they visit a friends house, there will be firearms, and since I cannot account for their safety rules, we do what we can on our end to prepare them for a possible encounter.
Since moving into a new, much l-o-n-g-e-r ranch style home last year, I've had to re-do things a bit. I now have two pistols accessable pretty much all the time, one at each end of the house.
An XD45 sits in the drawer next to my TV chair in the family room in one end of the house (it has a punch-pin trigger lock), and my Kimber TLE/II is my nighstand drawer gun, also with a trigger lock, in the other end of the house.
If time allowed during an encounter, the Remington 870 is in the bedroom closet, also secured from pilfering hands, but reasonably available.
My Kel-tec P32 is almost always on me with the assumption that I could respond immediately to a threat with them, then transition to another gun if/as I needed. Not a perfect system, but I am satisfied with the balance of safety factor v. accessablility--it's not a perfect world.
I also make extensive use of "light barriers" at night, with every quadrant of the house lit by the little solar powered floodlight thingys. They actually work pretty well and many mornings are still lit when I get up after 12 hours of darkness. Lights out front the garage and porch are more powerful, compact florescent type that are bright, but low-power consuming.
All that to say that I did not used to carry at home, but recently there have been home invasions and gangs exchanging gunfire within blocks of our residence--an unthinkable thing in our semi-rural area of TX until very recently, but now a reality.
So, with both passive and active systems in use and/or available we're about as secure and prepared as we can be.
FBT
