Coupla things:
1)This is the big one. Could you shoot someone if it came down to it? Someone breaks into your house, you grab your gun, fumble with it, he’s in your room just as you have it ready to go. You don’t know if he’s armed or not and if he is, you don’t know with what. A gun, a bat, a knife…maybe nothing…can you pull the trigger? Can you turn the burglar into a pile of dead guy on your bedroom floor? If the answer to that isn’t an instant ‘yup’, don’t get a gun. This isn’t the place to be hemming and hawing, he’s not going to be and you can’t be sure (or at least assume) he’ll kill you first if he thought the house was empty.
I was never totally sure about this one. I always assumed I could if it came to it, but never 100%. Then one day my store got held up at gun point. While my cashier was getting robbed, I was on the phone with 911 and and loading my a gun I had in the office. Don’t get me wrong, I’m wasn’t planning to run out there and do anything, I was just going to sit tight in my office and if the guy decided to to come check for other people in the building, he’d be dead. That was the day that changed me from thinking I could do it to knowing I could. I now know that (assuming I’m armed), if someone points a gun at me, I’ll have no problem shooting them, period.
2)From my CCW Class. If you’re going to keep a gun in your bedroom, that’s all well and good, but practice with it. Practice laying in bed, and going through every.single.step, from getting it wherever it’s going to be, to pointing it at the door. For most people that would mean rolling over, grabbing it, unlocking it, loading it, racking it, and pointing it at the bad guy. And, as they said, don’t practice until you get it right, practice until you can’t do it wrong. It seems so simple, but in a panic situation, you’ll mess this up. As a demonstration, they locked two guns up. One in a case, one with a cable. One with the code 1234, one with a key (and keep the key in your bedroom, not on your keyring, on the kitchen table). Handed each to two different people and told them when they say “go” they want the two students to unlock the guns and put the magazines in. When they said ‘go’ they started flashing the lights on and off, banging on the desks, yelling and screaming and generally making these people, who had to do little more than unlock a padlock, feel rushed and panicked. IIRC, it took them well over a minute. When we got held up, one of my employees (he was in the backroom. Looked like he feet were stuck to the floor he was so freaked out by it. Cop said that was totally normal.
3)I think someone said it, but shooting someone for breaking into your car is hard to defend. If you’re not in the car, you probably can’t to it. If you’re in it at the time, you may be okay if you repeat the mantra ‘I feared for my life’. Home intrusions are, of course, totally different and you’ll have to check the local and state laws regarding them, but if you ever were to shoot (and kill) someone, remember, you feared for your life.
I know this is a long post, but one more thing. I very much suggest you take a CCW class. Check the reviews on them and find one where people said they learned a lot, especially if it got into things like handling the gun or some minor self defense. Some of the stuff I touched on above was from that class.
Oh, and one last thing, always remember what’s behind your target. And not just behind the target, but behind the wall behind the target. I mean, I never plan to shoot someone in my house, but I do know that even if someone is in my bedroom with a gun, I can’t shoot them if they’re on a certain side of my bed because if (when) I miss, the stray bullets will go into my kid’s room, who will likely be up and moving because of the commotion. Where will your strays go? Kids? Neighbors? So keep that in mind also.
But, again, a basic handgun safety class should cover this kind of stuff.