There are a lot of options available on the market for good high quality gun safes. The question is which one is the right one for you. With so much information out there and advertisers explaining about their products endless sea of options how do you know what to look for so you can get the best protection for your firearms. Although there are some really good options to include, such as a biometric interface, the most important thing to focus on is the actual safe itself. How secure is the physical safe? If you’re not sure why this would be important, consider the following.

Although it is incredibly important that your loved ones are protected against handling weapons unsupervised, one of the biggest reasons why you would need something as extensive as gun safes is protection against thievery. Considering that a burglar’s main goal is to get in and out of your home as fast as they can, the issue is all about time. They simply want your belongings and don’t want to get caught taking them.

With this in mind realize that there has never been a safe made that couldn’t be broken into if the criminal has enough time. Gun safes are created not to keep your belongings directly from falling into unwanted hands, they are made to slow intruders down enough that they either get caught or run away.

Now, in order to do this you need a safe that is capable of keeping them at bay until this occurs and Underwriters Laboratories (UL), the industry rating standard, places ratings on gun safes to indicate how long it would take an offender to break into it.

At the bare minimum most home gun safes will likely have the Residential Security Container rating on the outside of it. This means that a professional could not get into this safe for at least five minutes. Beyond this, there is the TL-15 Burglary Classification which is a rating that indicates that experts, using everyday standard tools, were unable to gain entry into the safe for at least 15 minutes. One of the highest ratings goes to the TL-30 Burglary Classification. This is given by the UL for gun safes that can hold off against attack for at least 30 minutes.

Although these ratings come from strict and effective testing there are some ratings by the UL that are not as meaningful. Even though they can give you useful information about the safe one of the drawbacks to these ratings is the fact that some manufacturers use them to give misleading information about their product. This is done by implying that the safe is more secure than it might actually be. For example the B and C rating is an indication that the construction of the safe is at least ½ to 1 inch thick. There are other, less common ratings that are also sometimes used to imply that there is more to the construction or ability of a particular product.

The best advice for getting the best product is to get the most information about the ones you are interested in as possible, and then look for user reviews to see if others have been happy with the product. There is no sense in being the first to pave a path when there are likely others out there who have already had experience with gun safes.

Many children have been accidentally injured by guns lying around the house instead of being stored in a gun cabinet or a gun safe.

Between a safe and a cabinet, the former is generally considered to be the safer place for gun storage for obvious reasons.  In that regard, we shall look into the merits of Stack On safes.  These are made by the Stack On Products Company, one of the better known tool storage systems manufacturers.  For the company, guns are tools of the trade for a special sector of society.

Security Features

Any gun safe worth its salt – or price, for the less idiomatically inclined – will be judged based on its security features.  After all, security is what we pay for when we purchase safes, not its fire and water-resistant properties.

Many of the Stack On gin safes are sufficient for the purpose for which these were manufactured, give or take a few points for some deficiencies.  You have a choice between the rotary combination lock and an electronic keypad for most Stack On safes, of which the final decision will be based on your preference

Behind the lock itself, the minimum 1-inch steel hard plate appears sufficient to withstand drill attacks.  These are situations when thieves will get an electric drill in an attempt to bypass the lock.  It is a tough job to drill through even a 1-inch steel hard plate, more so with thicker plates in the other models.

And then we come to the locking bolts on the safe, which are designed to withstand pry attacks.  This time, the enterprising thieves will use crowbars to get to the contents of the safe with varying success.  For most of the heavier Stack On safes, it will be a Herculean feat to tip the safe over leverage and then try to open it.

Fire and Water Features

Most other safes will not offer fire and water-resistant features since these qualities can add to the costs of production and, hence, the tag price.  Well, not for the Stack On gun safes.  If you go for the Elite and Total Defense models, fire protection for 30 minutes at 1400-degree heat is an assured thing.  With firefighters striving to strictly follow a 6-minute response time to fire calls, the 30 minutes is sufficient.

Now, if fire is not your main concern but water, then the Stack On safes also offer this kind of protection.  This is one of the features that really make Stack On stand out from the rest of the players in the industry.  For the likes of the Elite, it can withstand submersion in 2-feet high water for a maximum of 72 hours.  You have to sufficient time to rescue your precious guns from being waterlogged.

All in all, the Stack On safes provides value for your money.  It will protect your guns from the usual threats of children’s curious fingers, thieves stealing into your homes and even from the natural elements of fire and water.