Gun Safes - A Safety and Security Essential

Civilians in the US have the unrestricted right to own licensed arms for hunting, in sports, and for self protection and also of their families. With this right comes the responsibility of using gun safes to store the arms to prevent three eventualities. These include unauthorized use, the arms falling into children's hands (who can unknowingly fire them and injure or kill someone), and their falling into thieves' hands.

Every state in the US has enacted laws that vest this responsibility on residents and incorporate punishments to those who do not comply with these laws. Accordingly, people there use gun safes to store their licensed pistols, revolvers, rifles, and shotguns in their homes.

Gun safes are lockable solid-steel plate made sealed containers of a size that can accommodate, protect, and safely store all the arms and ammunition owned by a family or an organization. Various types of gun safes are available. Their classification is based on various different criteria.

Such criteria include size of the guns. Under this classification are included small safes that can store small arms such as pistols and revolvers, and large safes that can accommodate rifles and shotguns, besides the small arms. The small safes cost upwards of $100, whereas large safes start around $1,000 and go up to $6,000.

The criteria include place of use. Under this classification are included home safes used by families and commercial safes used by organizations. The difference between these two safes is based on both size and features. Commercial safes tend to be much larger than home safes. They have more protective features, store very costly and more sophisticated arms, and therefore cost much more.

There are other criteria used to classify gun safes. Such other criteria include location and type of mounting. Under this come various assorted safes that include portable, floor-mounted, wall-mounted, corner-mounted, and hidden safes. Other criteria under the type of door classification category include single-door and double-door safes. The latter type is much larger than the former and can accommodate many more guns.

Type and degree of protection provided in a gun safe is another criterion of classification. Some of these safes use group two locking provisions. A semi-professional safe thief usually takes about 15 minutes to open such a lock. A group one electronic lock however is normally unpickable.

Some sophisticated and experienced gun safe thieves know that an alarm may be wired to the locking system on some of the valuables-containing gun safes. So, they use a gas cutter to simply cut through the single-walled side of a gun safe. So, whatever the locking protection, even the thickness of the steel used in a gun safe plays an important role in the protection of its contents. To prevent this, some gun safe manufacturers use steel plates of minimum three-eighths inch thick. These safes are much more costly than other safes.

Fire is considered a more probable eventuality in the case of gun safes than pilfering by thieves. Some of the gun safes are provided various different degrees of protection from fire hazard.