Just to be clear, my comment was only in response to "...you never thought of buying a safe before having a kid?" In hindsight, I guess he's saying the same thing I am. The kid shouldn't be the reason
I own a safe and agree with a lot of the reasons to own one, with the exception of protecting our own kids from them. I want a loaded gun in my boys room as soon as he's man enough to respect it. His friends will be nowhere near it, nor nowhere near mine. I don't do parties in the house where random people can wander around...and neither will my son.
I own one to keep the tweekers from getting their paws on the ones I care to keep. As far as fire goes, you can't get protection from anything less than around 2k. I haven't heard of anything surviving a good house fire that wasn't in a $2500 safe. You can add drywall, put a document box inside your safe for small stuff, but the guns are going to be toast...literally.
I really like Ron's idea of a gang box or tool box of some sort for solid "keep out" protection.