I own several guns myself, and my wife and I don't have any kids. When we first got married I used to keep a 12ga loaded (switching between birdshot, buckshot, and slugs) and a loaded 9mm on the top shelf of the closet. My wife has an irrational fear of break ins, so I thought it would be a good way to help her feel safe.

At work I deal with a lot of crime and criminals, and I've come to believe that having a loaded gun won't do anything but make a bad situation worse. Burglaries aren't a rare occurrence, but 99.99999% of the time, burglaries are crimes of opportunity. The vast majority are meth-heads looking to grab a few things to pawn to pay for their next fix or by pill poppers that want to rummage through your medicine cabinet and grab a few things to pay for a bottle of pills. The majority of burglaries are committed during the day when people are at work or church. If there is a break in during the night, the burglars are probably breaking in because someone left a door open or they think the owners aren't home. The goal is to get in and out with a couple of items without getting seen (because burglars know you can call the cops, and they don't want to get caught). Turning on a hallway light is likely going to be enough to scare the guy out of the house. For these guys, they're more likely to grab a gun to sell on the streets for their next fix if it isn't in a safe. This is probably the biggest risk of having a gun not stored in a gun safe, assuming that you don't have curious kids in the house.

Even if you've got a gun ready, someone happens to break in, you happen to be home, and you decide you need to confront the guy (presumably because you have children, otherwise your best bet would probably be to hole up in the bedroom with your wife and be ready to ambush them with a gun when they come in), the time it would take to get a gun out of a safe in the bedroom closet isn't going to make a difference. Furthermore, unless you're trained in tactical shooting, you're probably going to expose yourself to attack when confronting the burglar. If they didn't already have a mind to hurt you, they will when you come flying through the house shooting at them.

tl;dr: It's silly to think that (absent police or military training) having a loaded gun ready to go will have any benefit in defending yourself or your family. Aside from the risk of having someone misuse an unlocked weapon, chances are if someone ever does break into your house, they'll do it when you're gone and the gun will be the first thing they take.

If you're scared of break ins (which is probably an irrational fear), save the money and hassle and buy some motion sensing lights or a dog.