A gun safe is a wonderful thing for houses with children. However, if a burglar breaks into your house at 2 in the morning, you won’t have time to scramble through the dark, feed it the combination, then find and load your gun in the dark. For self defense purposes, you want your weapons where you can access them at any time.

A gun safe is incredibly convenient. It’s also a good place to store your more valuable guns, any collector items, or weapons your family hasn’t trained with yet. That last part is the most important. Before you strategically hide your guns in your home, you need to make sure every single person living there knows where to find them and how to use them. If you don’t take that precaution, you might as well be arming potential attackers. A gun in the hand of someone who doesn’t know how to use it is a gift to the person they’re defending themselves from. Before you start storing your guns outside a gun safe, take everyone in your household to a firing range and make sure they know how to use, load, clean, empty, and safely store any weapon you’ll have secreted about.

Once everyone in your household is trained up, you want to hide your guns where they’re easily accessible to you but not obvious to strangers.