This may be the answer I am looking for.
As you don’t WANT to kill. Scare, hurt, kill, destroy, in that order…
My dad kept unlocked guns in the house, and a loaded pistol in his car, the whole time I was growing up. I think I was at least 15 or 16 when he finally got a gun safe. I never ever ever ever touched them when he wasn’t around. He took me shooting when I was very young and said “never point a gun at anything you don’t want to destroy.”
my response is handgun and Glaser safety slugs. Won’t go through walls.
Granted I have no kids in my house, but if I did they would be in the next room perpindicular to my bedroom door, and I would be waiting until someone is actually in my door, not just making noises. Oddly enough, I tend to have insomnia, and will frequently veg out in bed reading on my droid, or surfing/playing EVE on my laptop in bed instead of up and wandering around with all the lights on. I have a very open plan tiny house [kitchen living area is all of 20x30 and it has a central ceiling fan with a 15 watt bulk that is on 24/7 so the light profile of my house changes very little after traditional bedtime. Souage, the shepherd husky mix lives in the back yard, leaving really only the front door and windows which are unsheilded by shrubs or trees as realistic entry ways.
Put me down as gimp, and have no reasonable expectation of escape. I cant just climb out a window and get away.
Won’t go through people, either. They leave craterous surface wounds that may completely fail to incapacitate a determined attacker.
Stranger
I grew up with guns in the house, easily accessible. Had my own .22 when I turned 12. When I was 14, we moved to a hobby farm where I could wander out back at will and kill gophers.
I lived through it.
The key is mindset. I was taught at an early age to never play with guns, to never point even my bb gun (which I got at age 8) at someone else for any reason. I was fully aware of what they could do. If a friend came over and said “hey, show me your gun”, it was “NO”, because I knew that it simply wasn’t allowed. Hell, my father would have literally kicked my ass from one end of the house to the other if I had done it. I guess the other side of it was that we simply were not allowed to be in our parent’s bedroom without permission and them in the room. Being caught in there would be a serious offense, worth a grounding at the very least.
Of course, if you’re raising kids in an environment where parental rules and guidance are more of a suggestion, then you’d be a fool to have accessable guns. Just like if you went the other extreme and crushed your child’s soul on a daily basis.
Me personally, if I had kids, I’d have one ‘extreme’ rule. “I will never beat you. I may spank you, but I’ll never beat you. EXCEPT if you ever touch my guns. Then I’ll beat you bloody. Then ground you. Then take away your toys. Because believe me, being beaten over it will be a lot easier on you than if you accidentally shoot someone because you’re acting stupid.”
Sorta what gurujulp said, except my response starts at “kill.” It escalates from there. Stranger has the right idea, but there will be no shelter.
“And the rock cried out, no hiding place.”
I take my duty to protect my wife seriously.
How about a sawed-off shotgun hanging under your desk?
No. If you are caught with a sawed-off shotgun of your own manufacture (with a few exceptions, none of which apply to the OP) you will be arrested for violating the National Firearms Act of 1934 unless you register said weapon with the BATFE.
If you choose to go that route, I think you’ll find that this will work quite nicely and save you the trouble of making it yourself.
In any event, a Mossberg 500 has a fairly heavy action and a safety switch, so for small kids it shouldn’t be a problem to leave it on safe and unchambered without locking it up, albeit well out of reach. If the kids are old enough to operate the action, then you should seriously consider a safe or something similar.
Well, yeah, but why not the best load to kill?
Your best bet is some sort of gun rack or gun safe that has either a biometric (fingerprint) lock or a push-button combination. And make sure you can open it by feel, in the dark. I know the combination to my gun lock box better than I know my cell phone number.
No such thing. People have been killed by a single shot from a .22LR and survived multiple .44 Mag. rounds.
Your only aim is incapacitation, if death results, so be it.
I dunno how it works out in actual practice, but I gotta think a Taurus Judge loaded with 3" magnum shells containing #2 (about 65 0.15" pellets) or #4 birdshot would be one helluva home defense weapon. Small enough to fit in one of those biometric safes, nasty enough at short range to make a mess of your attacker. The only issue with the smaller shot is the pattern out of this small of a gun. Guns&Ammo ran some tests with #4 shot. Here is the 5 foot pattern shot (click photo on right). They don’t recommend using that shot at ranges of greater than 15 feet. On the other hand, if your goal is to hole up in your bedroom and shoot anyone entering, it’s not likely to be any farther than that.
At longer ranges, consider that it can also fire .45 colt shells.
Que? 
If you own a gun, you are committed to killing. There is no lesser option.
(snipped, bolding mine)
Close ports 12, 16, and 410 and you’re all better!
[sorry, IT geek]
Was waiting for that!
Cinderblock, then…
From the article:
Read more: http://www.gunsandammo.com/content/judging-judge?page=1#ixzz17XRNRxL2
I bought one of these (which hasn’t been delivered yet) with the intention to mount it on the wall in our bedroom closet. I figured I’ll get into the habit of locking it when I leave in the morning and unlocking when I get home at night. We don’t have kids, so that helps.
I keep a progressive load (similar to what **silenus **said) in the magazine but nothing in the chamber, so the first thing will be the tell-tale pumping sound to chamber a shell… then if necessary, it gets worse from there. I hope I never need it, but home invasions (or at least, the reporting of them) seem to be on the rise lately in our general neighborhood, sometimes involving rapes. (Not that anyone would want me, of course, but there is the wife to consider…)
that’s exactly what my father did with us girls. from the time i was old enough to even know what a gun was, his ww2 army-issue .45 automatic was kept fully loaded and lying on the bottom shelf of his nightstand right out in the open.
we knew better than to get near it without his supervision, and we were both taught to shoot using that weapon in just about the same manner **carnivorousplant **mentioned. .45s packed a little bit of a punch for us girlie-girls back then. 
sis married a cop, who taught his two children about firearms, too. there are loaded weapons in their house. they all know exactly how to handle a weapon in his absence should it become necessary.
in the same manner, my shotgun is loaded with 00 and sits behind my bedroom door (no kids) as it has for the last decade. only had to use it once and never had to fire it in the process, thank god. a very effective ‘deterrent’ indeed.
They also don’t penetrate sufficiently to be an effective defense load. You’re much better off, if using a pistol, to opt for creased hollow points like hyrda-shok or gold dot. Most walls will stop them and they rarely exit the body but they do do the job of penetrating the body effectively.
I don’t know if that was in response to my earlier post about the racking sound of a shotgun, but I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that I would ever attempt to stop an intruder with an unloaded gun. I meant, rather, to specifically state that the sound of the first shell being racked into the chamber is a sound universally recognized as being the overture to a very unhappy opera.
My father taught me that there is nothing in the world as dangerous as an unloaded gun.
Also, I have a plan.