Gun storage options

On Friday, March 14th, House Bill 134 was introduced in the legislature and, if passed, would enact mandatory firearms storage requirements. It has been referred to the House State Affairs Committee but hasn’t been scheduled for a hearing yet. HB134 creates mandatory firearms storage requirements that could subject an individual to both criminal and civil liability for unauthorized access.

Last week, I wrote about HB89 which would establish a “red flag” law, allowing the confiscation of personal firearms based on only a phone call and a hearing where the firearms owner would have no knowledge these actions had even occurred, violating the firearms owner’s due process rights.

I have read reports which concluded that storing your unloaded personal firearms and ammunition separately in your home under lock and key could reduce “firearms accidents” by 70 percent. Unsupervised children and untrained adults are the ones most likely to shoot themselves or someone else if they find a loaded firearm or an accessible firearm and ammunition.

You have an impossible task trying to convince me there is such a thing as a “firearms accident.” The gun cannot load or fire itself. The only way either of those two things can happen is by the hand of man. No one would ever be injured in a firearms “accident” if the person handling the gun practices the rules of safe firearms handling. Lacking that knowledge, they simply do not handle the firearm. That’s just “common sense”!

If you have both firearms and children in your house, you instruct your children about firearms safety, and you don’t leave firearms lying around for the unknowing to find and handle. I agree that firearms need to be safely stored, but I object to the government dictating the only “acceptable” ways to store them.

At various times over the years, I have kept my guns in a closet corner, displayed on gun racks on the wall and in an open and unlocked cabinet. During most of that time, I was single with no one else in the home. After I got married, my wife was already well versed in safe gun handling from her father – I saw no need to change my gun storage habits. We were living in remote locations, so a burglary or theft was virtually nonexistent. I kept my ammunition neatly organized but near the guns and it wasn’t locked up either.

I kept a couple of the guns loaded and located where I could quickly and easily retrieve them if the need arose. Where I was living at the time, the need for a firearm was to chase off a bear, protect the hatchery fish from a predator or for protecting myself or my wife in the very unlikely event a “visitor” to our remote location decided he didn’t like Fish and Game while drinking aboard his boat. That last situation never arose but the first two “excuses” happened more than once.

After we moved back onto the road system, I became more conscious of two things which could rob me of my firearms – burglary and fire. With those thoughts in mind, I purchased a safe specifically designed for storing firearms.

The price was a little staggering until I realized that trying to replace just two of my rifles with scopes, scope mounts and accessories would cost more than the safe did. I realized that in dealing with my concerns about the security of my guns, I had also dealt with half of the safety concerns about having firearms stored in the house.

The other half of those safety concerns was the ammo storage situation. For that, I purchased one of the locking metal cabinets with interior shelving. Now I can keep my ammunition organized and securely locked up.

For home defense you can buy a small, lockable metal cabinet sized to hold a handgun. You can mount this “safe” on the nightstand and have quick access to a loaded handgun. Several of these “safes” operate electronically and can be programmed to open when a combination code is entered on a touchpad designed to work by feel, even in the dark.

In this litigious society, to protect yourself from others, you must be responsible for storing your personal firearms. If someone is hurt or killed with a firearm in your home, even if they were present without your consent, they or their family will find a shyster lawyer and file a suit against you.