jed wrote:While I'm not Lynyrd and you didn't ask me, I will tell you what I do. At night I have a fairly obnoxious blue heeler with alpha issues with people she doesn't know sleeping beside the bed. Any sound not normal in or outside of our house at night, she goes ape-poop. She will wake me with plenty of time to reach for any one of many firearm options.
That's the kind of thing I was looking for. A good dog which doesn't know how to make nice with strangers is a great addition to a household's night time security features. I have such a dog myself.....a boxer/lab mix, not a blue heeler....but he barks when a flea farts down the block during the day time. I don't imagine that anyone will be able to enter my house at night - either by stealth or by force - without eliciting a noisy and aggressive response from him. And that response is what gives me the time to acquire either a handgun or shotgun next to the bed.
I already mentioned that I don't usually carry at home unless I'm either on the way out the door or have just returned home, but that I always have a loaded pistol close at hand. There's a reason for that, and it has to do with comfort and pain relief. I already carry OWB rather than IWB for comfort/pain reasons. When I get home, I may leave my holster on, but I loosen the belt a notch and set the gun aside.
Others have mentioned small children in the home. We have a precious granddaughter who is getting to that "I must walk everywhere and touch everything" stage. Until recently, I've usually kept more than one loaded pistol on my dresser, just so that I can easily pick the one I'm going to carry before going out. Now, the only one on my dresser is the G17, with a TLRs light mounted, as my primary home defense/carry pistol. If I want to pick another one, I'll have to go to the safe, which is on the far side of the house. My shotgun has been leaned against the wall, in the corner near my side of the bed, chamber empty with a full 8 round magazine. This weekend I'll be putting some kind of mounting system on the wall, high enough to be well out of her reach, and the shotgun will go there.
Honestly, I don't know what I would do if I had no back problems and the attendant discomforts. Would I carry at home all the time? Maybe. Maybe not. I've adapted to
this reality, and I don't feel particularly at higher risk. But contrasted against that, I feel absolutely naked when I leave the house without a pistol, even if it is just to go down to the mailbox. So I am willing to admit that my comfort with
not carrying inside the home may simply be a psychological adaptation to the realities of my life—otherwise, why would I feel so naked
outside the home without a pistol? I can't say that I'm actually conflicted about it, but, it is this dichotomy in my own life that caused me to ask others the question about being disarmed while asleep versus armed while awake, and how they personally reconcile that dichotomy in their own lives. It wasn't a
challenge to their reasoning, since I've made a similar calculus in my own life regarding carry inside versus outside the home. The question was motivated more by a curiosity to know if their reasoning process was similar to my own.
That's why I never intended the questions to come off as condescending or intrusive. I am by nature a very introspective person.....not in an antisocial way, but rather in the sense that I spend a lot of time examining my own motives about almost anything, and it is often helpful to me to know how others answer these kinds of questions as a backboard against which to judge my own motives. A LOT of the time, when I ask questions that appear on their surface to be rhetorical during discussions like this one, I am
actually engaged in this process of self examination. So apologies to all who were offended by my line of questioning.
And by the way, my choice of where to live gives me the opportunity to shoot anytime I want to without disturbing anyone, and without leaving my own place. It also provides lots of live targets such as snakes, coyotes, and hogs.