He stated above that he has a 12 month old daughter.Teamless wrote:not knowing if (1) any kids in your house .....
To the OP, I have a 7 month old granddaughter whom we watch during the day. Currently, I have not deviated from my longtime habit of having a loaded handgun in Condition 1 on my dresser, and a 12 gauge shotgun in Condition 3 propped up in a corner of the bedroom. As soon as Kaylee is able to crawl (pretty soon), the shotgun will go on a rack above the bedroom door (I could do this now, but I am lazy), and I'll probably invest in a dresser-top safe of some kind.
I own a regular gunsafe, and I have a number of rifles, shotguns, and handguns already stored in it. But they are locked up and in another part of the house, and are therefore unavailable for home defense in a crisis.
A final note: you have to get this across to your wife...... exactly ZERO guns are useful for self/home-defense if they are kept unloaded. She simply has to trust in your ability to be safe about it, and you have to arrive at a point where your daughter will not be unsafe around firearms.
I accomplished this by allowing my (then) 4 year old son to see my guns, and then when he was 5 or 6 I started taking him to the range and had him shooting a youth-sized .22 rifle. So by the time he was old enough and big enough that gun safety could have been a problem in my house, he had already well and truly scratched that itch, and he was no longer curious about guns in a dangerous way. He is now a 25 year old gunsmith.
You really should introduce your child to firearms as soon as it is safe to do so, so that she will not be tempted to investigate without permission later as she grows older. She will already know what is safe and what is not.
The problem is that as long as you or your wife treat firearms like they are forbidden fruit, your child will be tempted to eat them......it's kind of a Garden of Eden thing. But when you teach a child that they can satisfy their curiosity in a safe way, under controlled circumstances, that curiosity will dissapate.
Just my 2¢....