[TexasSP]

Proper education is the key and you don't have to leave the gun laying next to the bed to be effective. Your kids know not to touch the hot stove or play with knives. The idea and end result is the same, education and safety. I grew up with guns in my house as a child and knew where they were. I also knew not to touch them and why. My kids are taught the same. In fact if my 5 year old happens to see my gun and I am not right there he immediately comes and tells me.

Having kids is just not a good argument for not having protection.

The other side of the coin is that you can't always control every aspect of where your kids will be and what they will find at someone else's house. It's not like you do a full interview with all your kid's friends' parents to see if they own guns. Better your kids know and understand than to come up on it naively. Kids who are never around and have not been educated about guns are far more likely to be curious when the see one somewhere. Knowing only what they see on TV they will not take the magnitude of handling one as seriously as a kid who grows up around them and is properly educated.

The actual statistics of children being injured or killed by guns in peoples homes is very small. Be careful when looking through statistics because they do not accurately differentiate street violence gun deaths from accidental deaths in homes. Many activists try to falsely make it seem as though the deaths are happening by accident while in reality they are not.