Buying Guide for Gun Safes

Gun safes come in a wide range of sizes and shapes and are designed to accommodate a wide range of purposes; from protecting the guns themselves to protecting your family from the guns within. Therefore, the first step in shopping around for an appropriate gun safe is to determine your specific purpose. Plainly if you want a gun safe meant to protect your vintage nineteenth century collector’s rifles your requirements are considerably different than someone that just wants to ensure that their children can not access them.


In that collector weapons are both valuable and desirable, the serious collector needs a gun safe that not only provides security against theft, but also secures the contents against fire and other external circumstances. For this kind of purpose, the large gun safes – essentially gun lockers – tend to be the more ideal solution. Most of these large gun safes stand at least six feet tall and have a considerable amount of room inside as well as extremely complex locking mechanisms and other protections. Needless to say, these very large gun safes are more like a major piece of furniture as opposed to a simple precaution for the hobbyist and tend to cost a lot more as well. However, for a serious collector a serious gun safe/locker may be the ideal investment for securely storing valuable and irreplaceable guns.


Of course most people probably do not need an enormous gun safe designed to hold a small armory. Indeed, most people buying a gun safe do so in order to have a safe place to store one or two small household firearms as well as other valuables (important documents, jewelry, etc.). That is, for most people, a gun safe doubles as a household lockbox. These are usually much smaller than the massive gun safes described above and frequently come with the option of bolting them to the floor (or otherwise in place). These types of gun safes also tend to be accessed more often, so basically require a fairly simple locking mechanism like a biometric lock, a key, or a combination. Most of these mid-sized gun safes/lockboxes may be too small to hold a large rifle without disassembling it, but are excellent for holding handguns as well as ammunition and other smaller accessories. Further, these smaller units can usually be situation in a closet or elsewhere around the home is an easily concealed, but also easily accessed, location.


Finally there are much smaller gun safes that are more or less designed specifically to keep unauthorized people from handling the gun(s), but offer little more than this. These gun safes tend to be very small and easily compact, meaning they do not offer a lot of protection against theft, although some come with the option of being mounted. Further these small gun safes are usually designed specifically to keep people out, so they do not offer a lot of additional insulation or protective elements to keep the contents safe from fire or other extreme environmental conditions. The real selling point of these small gun safes is that they keep unauthorized people from handling the guns inside, but at the same time leave the guns readily accessible by people with the means of opening them. This is the sort of gun safe that someone using their firearms for home defense would prefer, since it can slipped under a bed or some other easily accessed place while still being off limits to others.