At some point during the life of your shooting career, you’ll have to decide how you’re going to store your guns. It isn’t as important in the beginning when you only have one or two firearms that can be locked in their own cases, but as you continue to collect more you’ll have a decision to make. So what type of gun storage should you use? Here are some things to consider.
Gun Cabinet
Gun cabinets are good for storing firearms of different sizes where the only concern is to lock them out of the way of small children. The pros of using a cabinet to store your firearms is that you can easily get it to wherever you want it in your house because of its overall lightweight. And they do lock securely enough to keep young hands away from the goods inside. Finally, they are also an inexpensive method of storage, and if you’re handy, you even have the option of building one out of wood, and turning it into a beautiful piece of furniture.
Unfortunately, there are also cons to this method of gun storage. Because they are so lightweight, a thief looking to steal your firearms can much easier because he can remove the entire cabinet. Also, a gun cabinet offers little help for when disaster strikes. For example, if a fire consumes your house, the flimsy sheet metal that makes up your cabinet won’t resist flames for very long, if at all.
Gun Fire Safe
A fire safe is more for the serious collector, who also has more money to spend on his/her gun storage. In fact, this type of firearm storage can be very expensive and ranges from several hundreds of dollars for a small 10-12 long gun safe, to thousands of dollars for bigger, heavier safes. There are a lot of options that you can choose from when it is time to pick out a safe. For example, there are ones that are electronically activated with a keypad, those that require the use of a key and those that are bio-metric.
The pros to using a fire safe are: They are great for natural disasters because they are heavy and hard to move, which, also deters thieves. Furthermore, they are much harder to open because they are much harder to break into without a key. Finally, fire safes come in all shapes and sizes so you can store just a couple of handguns if that’s all you need to store. However, they aren’t without their negatives as well. For example, because they can be so heavy, they aren’t easy to get where you want. And, the bigger ones tend to cost a small fortune to buy.
Rust Proof
No matter which firearm storage solution you decide to go with, you need to make sure you take care of them properly. This means that you need to make sure your gun collection doesn’t begin to rust as moisture builds up inside of your cabinet/safe. The easiest way to do this is to buy a one of the many dehumidifiers that can be used inside a safe/cabinet.
Securing our firearms is important to keep them out of the hands of our children, and anyone who may like to steal them. But the way we store them is equally as important to keep them rust free and in tip top shape for many years to come.
© Gwolters | Dreamstime.com – Putting Firearm In Gun Safe Photo
