[Mike P. Wagner]

Wow! I’m the minority here. My guns are for entertainment and hobby. I didn’t buy them for protection. I live in a decent neighborhood and I do have dogs that will give me a bit of warning.

I'm more or less with you on that. Here's my analysis:

1. I live in a quiet cul-de-sac with a very nosy lady at the entrance. If a car is parked over night on the cul-de-sac, and she doesn't know who it is, she calls the police. And they come! (Last time, it was a guy from an apartment several blocks away trying to his car from a the repo man!)
   
2. I also wake up slowly and at times am confused when I wake up.
   
3. There are lots of kids over at the house. Mine are safe around guns, but I don't really know about the others.
   
4. I have a college age son, and when he's in town, he and his friends keep extremely unpredictable hours. The college age son is also probably why I don't have much cash or electronics lying around.

So I have made about the same judgment call that you have.

However, it strikes me that the following two situations would prompt a higher level of vigilance:

so at times I do tent to have 20,000 dollars or more of car audio equipment at the house. No cash laying around but I do have a lot of valuables in the house.

Put another way the most consistently heavily armed individual I knew was a LEO in the IA division of a big city department who had considerable responsibility for catching and removing mobbed up and otherwise corrupt cops.

I think it's pretty hard to determine if a given level of vigilance is reasonable ("prepared") or unreasonable ("paranoid") without understanding the level of threat. If you are in a war zone, thinking that there is an army of people looking to kill you a perfectly reasonable assumption. That's probably not the case if you're shopping for pants at a suburban Target.

Mike