Had a couple of either burgular alarm goes off at 2am or the dogs go nuts over something in the yard happen. When the alarm went off I got 911 on the cordless while I checked out the inside of the apt with a 9mm HG in hand. Don't know if it was anything, didn't see any signs of forced entry, and a deputy showed up and checked out the property in 2-3 minutes. Two years later after I'd moved out, a woman was murdered in the same apartments by a guy who broke in at 2am, robbed her, and strangled her, so maybe it was something, maybe nothing. I sure felt more comforted having a pistol by the bedside though the one or two times in 15 years when I've had to check out something wrong (the other times were a neighbor's dog getting loose and going through our yard. Called # on dog's collar and dog returned safely to family, happy ending
Again, had the pistol locked and loaded with safety off (hammer down), and didn't point it anywhere but the ground, but I was awfully glad to have been able to just reach in the bedside stand and load and make ready in a couple of seconds.
Only other time was actually a CCW situation, I was in my car trying to return books to the library late Friday afternoon before the 2004 election. Stupid me forgot the library was being used for early voting, and there was a mob of 300+ people trying to early vote, plus a sea of their parked cars blocking the neighborhood all over the place. By the way, the library's next to a low-rent nasty neighborhood with bars on all the windows, and the library sits on the only street in or out. Result is a gridlocked nightmare I got caught up in, and some of the people around were getting road-raged between the gridlock and maybe also the nasty political namecalling etc going on in the crowd. When I saw the first angry motorist jump out of his car and go after the driver of another car, I thought "oh crap, I'm watching a riot start". The mood was ugly. Again, I was glad to have a piece in the car with me (CCW this time, not being at home), and the crowd got ugly enough I actually pulled the stored pistol out, loaded it and racked the slide, just in case (kept it out of sight. At the time, I used to leave it unloaded in the console with one or two loaded mags in the console with it). Took me over an hour to get my car turned around and move the less than 100 yards to escape that situation. Again, didn't quite get up to feeling threatened enough by a particular person to point it at anyone, but I was VERY glad to have it with me in the car.