"why on earth would anyone keep a loaded gun in their home?"

A neighbor just asked me "why on earth would anyone keep a loaded gun" accessible in their house?

I think the answer is very important.

"I'll disclose in advance that I'm a licensed firearms instructor who teaches civilian professional shooters.

With regard to the need to keep firearms ready to use and instantly accessible, the best analogy is to fire extinguishers.  If you are preparing to go to war, you bring a tank.  If you are preparing to go to a house fire, you bring a fire truck.  But those are both cumbersome and expensive items to own and to maintain, and most of us are not planning to go to either a war or a structure fire.  Unless you are in those lines of work, you don't need that caliber of gear.  For occasional and unanticipated use you can get by with much smaller versions of those tools, namely handguns and fire extinguishers.

Firearms and Fire Extinguishers are emergency life-saving tools.  By definition, an emergency is an UNEXPECTED life threatening circumstance.  Emergencies do not happen by appointment, and you cannot prepare for them once they are in progress.

You wouldn't think of keeping your fire extinguisher unloaded, hoping  that if a fire broke out in your kitchen that you would be able to load it and put out a fire before it spread out of control.  If you don't have a ready working fire extinguisher, that you know how to use properly, stored where you need it, you might as well not own one. By the time you find it, load it and discharge it, the chance for it to help you has passed.

The same goes for firearms.  The life threatening emergencies for which a firearm would be needed arise seeming spontaneously to the would-be victim, and the time window in which it will help you is very narrow.  While a trio of home invaders may know for hours that they are going to attack, you have no advance knowledge of the events about to unfold until one person is knocking on your front door while two others are kicking in the back door.  At that point, an unloaded weapon locked up in your safe is about as useless as that unloaded fire extinguisher... about as useless as the gun left at home when gunfire erupts in the restaurant, the mall, the movie theater, your church or your school.

After you wake up from a pistol whipping induced concussion and free yourself of the duct tape, you can feel free to call the police and have them write up a nice report about the whole thing.  But understand that they can't help until the are there, they can't get there until after you call, and you can't call while you're fighting for your life. If the thugs are caught, that doesn't undo the effects of your injuries, so it's irrelevant.   Kind of like finding the arsonist doesn't help much towards replacing the building.

So far as loading a gun during an emergency, it's physically very difficult if you have not trained often to do so. When we perceive a threat that scares us, our adrenal glands spit out a dose of adrenaline, which instantly prepares your body and mind for "fight or flight."  With the exception of the large leg muscles used for running, blood is diverted from the extremities and brought to the protected core, resulting in an almost immediate loss of feeling in the fingers, rendering them useless for any tasks that require fine motor skills, such as loading a gun.  

The combined effects of adrenaline and the accompanying spike in your blood pressure changes the shape of, and blood-flow to your eyes, resulting in a tunnel vision that makes it difficult so see anything other than the object of your fears.  Great for focussing intently on the threat, but not such a good time to go rummaging for your gun.

And just as the best fire extinguisher in the world won't do you a bit of good if you don't know how to use, neither will any gun render you able to protect yourself if you lack the skills to use it effectively, safely and lawfully.

Don't complacently believe that there are "good neighborhoods" and "bad neighborhoods" when it comes to the risk of such crimes.  Home invasions almost always involve perpetrators coming from a bad area to take the kind of things we have in our "good" area.  Our modern road system allows anyone to get from any address in this country to any other address.  I pulled up the stats for one city last year... over 5000 home invasion robberies.  If you wonder why you don't hear about it, it's because it happens so often that it's no longer newsworthy.  But you can visit the FBI's UCR (Uniform Crime Report) online to get the latest stats.

I don't mean to fill four hundred pages here... I've already done that in my latest book, "Going Armed" if you care to know more about this.

I hope this was helpful."