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Her dad was one of those guys that was not going to be surprised and often took to roaming the house with his gun ... just to protect the family mind you.
As it turned out that night, dad must have heard a noise and when he saw a shadow-figure he fired. His daughter died in his arms. When I think of this event, I always wonder what goes through his mind on her birthday.
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This has nothing to do with her father "roaming the house with his gun" and everything to do with him shooting at an unidentified target.
It's extremely important to identify a target before firing at it. It's true that those who refuse to learn this lesson are better off without a firearm, but it's backwards to imply that the problem could be solved by not immediately arming one's self in response to a potential housebreaker.
If a person is going to have firearms for self-defense he must learn to use them safely. If he can't or won't learn to use them safely then the solution isn't to access the gun more slowly, the solution is to not have firearms at all.
Your post is tantamount to recounting a situation where a child was killed as a result of a person driving 100mph on a residential street and then implying that the problem was that the person driving should have left his car at home and walked that day. The problem isn't that the person was driving at the time, it's that the person was using the car in an extremely unsafe manner.
Similarly the problem wasn't that the father in your story had a firearm on him during the incident or that he accessed it too readily, it was that he used his firearm in an extremely unsafe manner.