WCGW: Breaking into the wrong home in Kentucky

Before I became a father I owned zero guns.

Logically I know there's almost no way I'll ever use them against another person. I know that now and I've always known that but when I became a dad and I held my brand new 7 pound baby girl the way I thought changed.

In the first few months her mom was so much more important to her than I was. I loved my daughter more than I ever loved anything and I knew that one thing I could do for her during this time was make sure she was protected in all the ways I could think of. I baby proofed everything, I read articles, I covered every logical base I could.

We lived in a very safe place and we had a 6' privacy fence and I kept locks on all of the gates. I felt like I had made our house and lives as safe as they could possibly be. One night my wife was feeding our daughter before bed, they were in her room and my dog started going nuts at the back door. That wasn't that unusual, if a raccoon or rabbit dared get too close to the sliding glass door, the dog always went nuts. Either way I walked over to try to calm the dog down and look out to see what critter had found its way to the porch, only this time it wasn't some animal, it was a young white guy about 30' from my back door.

My kid was in the next room and all that was standing between my helpless baby and a man who had just scaled a 6' fence at night were me my wife and our dog. In a fair fight, there was no way he'd have a chance, I had a big dog but I realized that if he had a gun there was nothing I could really do to protect us in that situation.

It turns out that it was just some kid who had a warrant for a pot charge running from the cops but that incident made me realize that if he had wanted to come in and hurt us (for any reason) I couldn't have stopped him if he had a gun. Had I had a gun it would give me a fighting chance.

So I realize it's probably never going to happen, thankfully. But my kid was probably never going to get the childproof cap off of the bleach and drink it, but I still put a childproof lock on the cabinet door where we kept the chemicals (not the same, I know but it's the same line of thought). Owning a gun wasn't about being practical it was about doing all that I could to protect my daughter, rational or not.

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