The Smart Way to Buy Guns Online
The best gun safe accessories ranked in the order to buy them: a bolt-down kit, a hygrometer, a dehumidifier and a light first, then a door panel, pistol rack, rifle rods and an outlet kit, with live prices and what a fully kitted safe costs.
Are biometric gun safes reliable? The good ones are, but the CPSC has recalled 323,990 biometric gun safes that opened for strangers. Here is every recall, our own false-open and lockout test data, and a ten-minute test for the safe you already own.
Gun safe fire ratings explained, with a database of 23 safes checked against UL, the California DOJ roster and CPSC recalls. See which ratings are independent and which are the maker’s own.
Hornady has moved from fingerprints to palm veins. The pattern sits under the skin, so wet, cold or dirty hands stop being the problem they are on a fingerprint reader.
What gun safes really weigh by class, what each steel gauge weighs per square foot, and the arithmetic that shows about half a fire-rated safe is gypsum lining rather than steel, including how to use it to disprove a gauge claim on a spec sheet.
Whether a second floor can hold a gun safe, using the live loads, deflection limit, joist spans and stairway clear widths the International Residential Code actually publishes, including the 30 psf sleeping-area figure almost every guide on this subject gets wrong.
How to bolt down a gun safe on a concrete slab or a wood floor, using the anchor sizes, hole depths, minimum slab thickness, edge distances and installation torque that ICC-ES and the Forest Products Laboratory publish, rather than the round numbers everyone repeats.
Where to put a gun safe in your house, room by room. The minimum doorway safe makers actually publish, what the building code allows a bedroom floor to carry, humidity, concealment, fire and what happens on delivery day.
The 8 best wall-mounted gun safes for 2026, split between in-wall safes that recess between studs and surface mounts that need no cutting.