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I'm looking for advice/info on gun safes. I recently purchased a Rock River LAR-15 and it's my first AR. My wife is concerned about keeping it in the house so I have it in our shed for now, but she wants the thing properly locked up and I have no real experience with long rifles.

We already have a small biometric safe under our bed for my Glock, but we're looking to get something that will be big enough to house the AR and the hunting rifle I plan to buy this year. I read this review of different gun safes (https://gunnewsdaily.com/reviews/gun-safes/), but I'm not sure which would be the right fit for us.

Does anybody have any preferences when it comes to gun safes? The in wall one is what my wife is leaning towards, but I don't want something that's gonna require construction or anything. I like the gun closet idea, but like I say I don't really know much about em.

Any specs, pros, cons, whatever would be helpful. We live by the water so we definitely want a safe that's water resistant and fireproof. I dont know if they make ones that are both but if someone can suggest a good waterproof one, that would be great. Thank you.

I am going through a "safe search" myself.

This is the best advice written down that I have run across. Get a beverage, takes awhile to go through it: http://gunsafereviewsguy.com/

One of the main points, if you haven't already run across it, is that nearly all "gun safes" are not safes at all, they are at best fancy Residential Security Containers, i.e. metal boxes of varying thicknesses that can be opened with pry bars in minutes, in most cases. Fancy expensive ones have safe-like features, i.e. lots of visible locking bolts and multiprong handles, but the actual construction of the box and the (hidden) linkage are often flimsy.

I am following his advice of getting the least expensive RSC I can, basically a couple of stack-on or homak-type boxes, hiding them and making them as difficult to find and work on as possible, and saving up for a real safe, i.e. buying a used TL-15 or TL-30, or a new/used Sturdy Safe. I have been perusing ebay and note that if you watch for awhile you can usually come up with a TL-15 or TL-30 for what many of higher-priced "gun safes" in a gun store or big box store go for.

If by "waterproof" you mean safe from flooding, I have only seen one or two safes advertised as waterproof, and I think they were oriented to water from firefighting actions in fire, not flooding. Best defense against flooding is probably put safe above ground level. Or move.

Is there any particular reason your wife has a concern about keeping it in the house? Small children perhaps?

I don’t understand these situations as my wife and I are never more then 10 feet from a firearm

Stack-On Total Defense line is waterproof in 2 feet of standing water for up to 72 hours. I have the 40-gun model. http://www.stack-on.com/product/total-d ... -gun-safe/

I’m not saying that it isn’t worth it to have waterproofing if you can get it at a reasonable price, but what is the price? I don’t believe that either my old safe or my current one are water “proof”, although they will certainly keep a firehose from penetrating the safe. My bigger worry is fire-resistance, as I keep more than just guns in the safe. Also, I believe that some fireproofing is the result of the seal in the door swelling under heat, and therefore keeping the heat from penetrating the safe for longer. But if heat causes the seal to swell, then lack of heat means that the seal is less resistant to water. But exactly NO safes are 100% fire-proof. They are fire resistant, and that resistance is limited by time. The better the safe, the longer it will resist temperature rising inside the safe to the point where it will damage/destroy the contents.....but eventually they will ALL fail. A better safe will give you presumably long enough fire resistance to protect your belongings until the fire department can get there and knock down the flames around the safe.

If you’re genuinely worried about flooding, why not pour an elevated slab or stack up some cinderblocks or bricks to a height that will provide a platform above any likelihood of flooding, and simply place the safe on the platform? You could also point out to your wife that a gunsafe in a shed out back is far more likely to become an armory for the local criminal elements than a gunsafe strategically placed inside the home......so inside the home would actually be safer? My guess is that the very first time she suggests that you retrieve the shotgun from the shed out back and realizes that will get you killed even faster than staying inside, she might change her tune.

So in addition to my guns, my safe also contains things like my NFA trust papers, emergency supply of paper money and silver bars/coins, etc. I live in a geographical area where, if flooding affects my home, we’re talking an Old-Testament biblical event, and literally nothing will matter any longer. Fire is a much more likely concern. The same is true about the neighborhood I’ll be moving to in about 3 weeks from now.

Everyone's situation is, of course, different, but I cannot imagine a situation where I needed to own a waterproof safe.

Now that being said, we were expecting flooding during Harvey, both here at home, and at my wife's store. Safeguarding the safe contents at home during the flood wasn't much of a concern - we had a plan in place to bug out with the important things if the water came our way (thank God it didn't).

But her store was a different thing. We live across town about 17 miles away, and we knew we might not be able to get there for an extended time. The store's safe needed a bit more protection.

As ELB mentioned above, most 'gun safes' are not really safes at all - they are really just residential security containers. But my wife has a jewelry store, and her safe's price point was north of $10,000. It's an absolute beast of a safe. It took ten men, two monks, and a circus clown to get that thing inside her store. You'd hope that by searching around that price point that it would be waterproof, but not so much.

But we'd had her safe for 10 years now, and this was the first time we really thought we needed waterproofing. So, off to Home Depot I went, and one half hour later, we had a waterproofed safe for less than $10, thanks to a little hillbilly engineering.

So I ask you to consider - how often do you expect to need waterproofing? If flooding is a regular occurrence, then you might want to go down that path, but if security is a bigger concern, and every once in a while you experience a 1000-year flood event, you might do better to spend your $$ on a better safe, and keep an $10 emergency waterproofing kit (similar to the one I employed above) handy when the next hurricane hits.

Vol Texan wrote:Everyone's situation is, of course, different, but I cannot imagine a situation where I needed to own a waterproof safe.

Now that being said, we were expecting flooding during Harvey, both here at home, and at my wife's store. Safeguarding the safe contents at home during the flood wasn't much of a concern - we had a plan in place to bug out with the important things if the water came our way (thank God it didn't).

But her store was a different thing. We live across town about 17 miles away, and we knew we might not be able to get there for an extended time. The store's safe needed a bit more protection.

As ELB mentioned above, most 'gun safes' are not really safes at all - they are really just residential security containers. But my wife has a jewelry store, and her safe's price point was north of $10,000. It's an absolute beast of a safe. It took ten men, two monks, and a circus clown to get that thing inside her store. You'd hope that by searching around that price point that it would be waterproof, but not so much.

But we'd had her safe for 10 years now, and this was the first time we really thought we needed waterproofing. So, off to Home Depot I went, and one half hour later, we had a waterproofed safe for less than $10, thanks to a little hillbilly engineering.

So I ask you to consider - how often do you expect to need waterproofing? If flooding is a regular occurrence, then you might want to go down that path, but if security is a bigger concern, and every once in a while you experience a 1000-year flood event, you might do better to spend your $$ on a better safe, and keep an $10 emergency waterproofing kit (similar to the one I employed above) handy when the next hurricane hits.

I was thinking plastic and gorilla tape . Really! It works!