Many of us have firearms explicitly for home protection and self-defense. But while it’s nice to think about sleeping with your handgun under your pillow, this isn’t a long-term solution or very responsible in reality. Guns that aren’t properly secured are too risky, particularly if you have kids or untrained individuals in the same household.
At the same time, you need to ensure that you’ll be able to reach your handgun or another firearm quickly in case you ever do experience a dangerous situation.
Today, let’s take a look at how you can safely store and quickly access your firearms for home protection situations.
How to Balance Storage Safety and Rapid Response
The primary things to balance when you think about how to store your weapons at home are response time and overall safety.
Storing your guns at home means keeping them in places where kids or unauthorized people can’t get ahold of them very easily. This also involves keeping your guns hidden or otherwise stored so that burglars can’t get your firearms while you aren’t at home – you could easily get in trouble depending on your state’s gun licensing laws if this ever were to be the case.
But at the same time, you don’t want to make your guns so secure that you can’t retrieve them in the event of a home invasion. In such a scenario, every second might count, so you need to be able to retrieve your guns quickly for self-defense.
Thus, you have to consider options that balance safety and rapid response time in equal measure. Here are the main types of gun storage products you should think about.
Gun Cases
Gun cases are the most common storage solution in the entire country. While plenty of people also use safes (more on the below), gun cases are incredibly common because lots of people already have one or two for taking their guns on a hunting trip or to the gun range. Most folks don’t just keep their guns out in the open while they’re in transit or if they aren’t on their hips.
Gun cases are exactly what they sound like: they hold your firearms and are relatively easy to open. Perhaps most importantly, they allow you to keep all your firearms and ammunition in the same place. You could theoretically keep your main guns beneath your bed in a great gun case.
However, you’ll want to be sure that the gun case in question comes with at least some kind of lock. This will prevent kids from gaining access to guns if they find them beneath your bed or any other place you end up storing the case.
Gun Safes/Vaults
The next step up from a gun case is a gun safe or vault. These are dedicated gun storage lockers that allow you to keep your firearms safe and secure and may use multiple types of locking mechanisms to protect them. Some of the best gun safes even come with fire-rated safety features, meaning that your weapons will survive even if your house or the room they’re stored in burns down.
However, gun safes and vaults do take a couple of seconds to open, even in the best-case scenarios. Some of them use combination locks, while others may rely on biometric fingerprint ID scanners. Either way, you’ll need to position your gun safe such that you can easily access it and open it quickly if necessary.
But the plus side to gun safes is that it’s almost impossible for kids or people who shouldn’t be getting into the guns in the first place (like burglars) to do so without knowing all your security secrets beforehand. Ultimately, gun safes are the most protective choice overall, but also the slowest when it comes to weapon retrieval.
Gun Stands
You can alternatively invest in a gun stand. This isn’t very secure; a gun stand or kickstand just positions your gun in an upright position so that you can retrieve the weapon by grabbing the grip. It allows for faster retrieval than if you kept your pistol on the upper shelf of your closet and had to fumble around in the dark until you snagged it with your fingers.
Again, gun stands don’t do anything for actual security. Anyone can grab the gun if they find it, so it may be a better solution if you live by yourself and aren’t too concerned with burglary. A gun kickstand will allow you to retrieve your weapon quickly and smoothly every time.
Trigger Locks
The last possible gun safety solution is a trigger lock. These are incredibly small accessories that you attach to your handgun or rifle’s trigger and to prevent the weapon from being fired. As you can imagine, these types of safety solutions are best used for handguns, given their small size and the likelihood that you’ll probably own a handgun in a home defense situation anyway.
A trigger lock allows you to keep your gun in the open or outside of a bulky safe that might take several seconds to unlock. You can retrieve your gun and undo the trigger lock as you prepare to defend yourself all at the same time. Even better, a would-be attacker might see that you’re armed, even though the trigger doesn’t function until you take the trigger lock off, and run away.
Note that trigger locks aren’t the best choice when it comes to protecting your kids or other people from guns, however. These are the easiest type of security solution to get past, and kids may be able to deduce your combination.
Conclusion
All in all, there are multiple storage and security solutions for your firearms. It’s up to you to decide which of these is the best choice for your needs. You might get a lot of value from combining several of the methods together.
For instance, you could combine a trigger lock with a gun stand to ensure that your weapon couldn’t be fired without your permission, but also guarantee that you’d be able to retrieve it in an instant if necessary. Consider your options carefully – gun safety is an important responsibility for all gun owners!