Can you remember way back to elementary school when you were shown old gun safety videos?
Two friends are playing in the parents’ room. One of them asks the other if they want to see a gun. They find the firearm, usually underneath a bed, loaded, outside of a secure case with no safety on. They start to play with it and, before long, tragedy strikes.
In retrospect, these videos were pretty crude. Production quality was very low, and the acting was (to be polite) not Oscar-worthy. However, for many children, these videos were the only exposure they got to firearm safety. Because of being exposed to those videos when we were young, us older folks grew up more aware of home firearm safety. As a result, firearm owners now tend to teach their children about safety from a much younger age.
If you want to increase firearm safety in your home, here are some of the steps you should take:
Teach Your Kids About Guns
While your children will likely be shown a similar video to what you watched in a school, it’s important that you still take the time to teach your kids about firearms and why safety is so important.
Often, kids go looking for firearms in the home because they’re curious. They know that they aren’t allowed to play with guns, so their curiosity gets the better of them. You can take the mystery out of firearms by simply showing them your collection and teaching them to respect it. There are children out there who, when properly taught about firearms, have more respect for their potentially deadly nature than many adults.
Secure Storage
A firearm should never just be left lying around outside of a secure case.
Many years ago, some people would just leave their shotgun under the bed. Today, most firearm owners tend to take a much safer approach to firearm storage.
If kept in your home, your firearms should always be stored in a lockable case. Whether this is a combination lock or a physical lock is up to you. Either way, make sure that the “key” isn’t readily available to anyone. If it’s a combination, save it in a password-protected file on your computer or phone.
Depending on how many firearms you have, buying appropriately-sized cases for them can get expensive. Gun safes are large, heavy, and can be a pain to maintain. Plus, once you have a gun safe placed in a specific area in your home, that is where it’s going to live as it’s too massive to easily move.
The best solution is to remove your firearms from your home. By putting them in our secure storage facility, they’ll be continuously monitored and stored in environmentally-optimal conditions. You can get access to your firearms by calling us. It’s definitely the safest way to maintain a firearm collection!
Keep the Guns and Ammo Separate
The firearms in those old gun safety videos were always left loaded. This is a significant firearm safety violation!
Not only should your firearm never be left loaded, but the ammo shouldn’t be stored anywhere near the gun. You should have a separate storage solution for your ammo a distance away from the firearms. This can be a smaller safe as ammo doesn’t take up as much space. Even if a curious child finds a firearm, there will be no ammo to load into it.
Mind you, this isn’t just a personal safety tip—it’s also a tip to protect your collection. Could you imagine if you accidentally left one of your firearms loaded and it went off inside your gun safe? It could cause massive amounts of damage to your collection! So, always keep your ammo and guns separate.
Get Insurance
For many people, their firearms are some of the most valuable items they have in their home. Some collectors have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rare and expensive guns.
Like all valuables, you want to make sure that if the unthinkable happens and your firearms are somehow damaged, you’ll be covered. Here’s the problem: sometimes the value of your firearms isn’t covered by your home contents insurance, and getting a separate policy can come at quite a personal cost. But it’s a small price to pay to keep the value of your collection safe from fire, flood, or other natural disaster.
Alternatively, you could also send your entire collection to our safe storage facility. We are fully insured, meaning that if the worst ever happens, your firearms will be covered. We even take care of the paperwork for you!
Effective home firearm safety comes part and parcel with being a firearm owner. Thankfully, there are ways that you can reduce (or even remove) any potential safety issues involving your guns. If you’d like to learn more about GTA Guns safe storage, or any of our other services, please feel free to contact us! It’s our priority to make sure that your firearms will always be stored in optimal and safe conditions.