I think so yes. There are always signs of severe mental illness, no matter how much someone tries to hide it. You just have to know what to look for.
And about the statement “no one should have loaded, unsecured guns in their home anyway,” yeah I disagree completely. I have a handgun, for protection, and mainly for when my husband is out of town. If someone were to break into my home, my children and I would already be threatened before I had time to open a safe/lockbox and load the damn thing.
If you have a gun for self-defense, keeping it unloaded and locked up makes zero sense. In your panic and adrenaline rush, you’d be fumbling to get the bullets in by the time you’re already pinned and being beaten or raped.
You have to educate your kids on what can happen should they decide to mess with it. We’ve taken our teenager for target practice so she knows how to aim should she, God forbid, be forced to do so. BUT we also drilled it into her head that she is never to touch the gun unless we tell her to, because she could accidentally kill someone. We told our basically youngest the same thing, that it’s for protection only, and if we catch her around it, there will be hell to pay, and she should just forget that it’s even there. It stays up high where she can’t reach it without a makeshift ladder, but it remains loaded and ready to go, should the worst-case-scenario present itself.