I feel extremely safe at home. It would be hard not to.
(If I’ve told this store before, I apologize – I have a short memory.)
The home we rent is in a very quiet and safe neighborhood. We are, in fact, the only house I know of in the area with bars on the windows. It turns out that our landlords, who used to live in the home, were close friends with someone who was killed by the Nightstalker when he was still roaming around free. The bars went up out of (understandable) paranoia shortly thereafter. In another coincidence, even the access into and out of our garage is very secure because the previous renters used to run a business and keep valuables in there.
So I’m never concerned about anyone being able to break in while we’re home, and I’m pretty comfortable going away for extended periods of time. And that’s saying something; I tend to be far more paranoid about such things than my wife is. I always double- and triple-check locks when we’re going out of town.
My mother gets up in the middle of the night to verify that the locks are still locked in her house. It’s quite unsettling, especially in her zero crime neighborhood.
Living in the country and my doors are never locked unless I’m planning to be out of town for a couple of days.
Hey, you never know when Michael Moore might decide to wander into your house while making a documentary.
I feel really safe. I live in an apartment with a doorman. And I have a lock, of course. And I’m on the thirteenth floor, so it’s doubtful anyone’s going to climb in, excepting Spidey.
I was thinking about this very subject earlier today while reading this thread. While I’ve always been fascinated by guns, I’ve never owned one and was wondering about the people who own them for home defense. What are the odds you’d need a gun against an intruder in your home? I know it depends on where you live. I lived in NYC for many years in a variety of safe and unsafe buildings without issue. Now I live in a rural/suburb in NC and feel pretty safe. I have two young children so the topic is important to me, but the threat here is minimal at best. I also have a 160 lb. dog (who, when he chooses to bark, can rattle the trees but is generally very friendly.) We usually keep the doors locked at night.
I felt really safe in my second story apartment, because zombies can’t climb stairs.
cough
I actually went through something of a bad phase a few months back. I’d been robbed twice about four years ago and it still pokes at my mind sometimes. For a while I was watching To Catch A Thief and marveling at how easy it was for the host to break into the house…and that triggered a complete panic every single night. Every single night I was dead certain someone was going to try breaking in, and I slept so lightly that a random sound from the cat would startle me awake. I went downstairs three or four times each night, checking the locks and windows, before I was satisfied enough to go to sleep. Locking the gate helped a little, but not by much. Not my proudest moment.
I got over it after a while, thankfully, when I realized that a bookbag I’d left on the doorknob to my shed, where anyone could pop the gate open and grab it, hadn’t been moved for several months. The neighborhood isn’t that great; I’m right next to a park that apparently has a lot of drug and gang activity, but after realizing nobody’s bothered to take my bookbag after it’s been out for so long, I stopped worrying so much. I lock the front door still, but I sleep much more soundly.
I feel safe in my middle class neighborhood.
We usually lock all the doors and windows when we leave, but sometimes we forget and no one has robbed us. When we’re home we usually lock the front door, but when the weather’s nice, all the windows and the two back sliders are generally open. We sleep with our slider in the master bedroom open for the breeze.
Of course it helps that we have two medium sized dogs that have “very big dog” growls and barks.