We all know that the safest place for a firearm in the home is behind lock and key, but this directly contradicts the idea of having a firearm ready to go at a moment’s notice for home defense. This conundrum has kept some of us up at night and you might have gone through the internal struggle of trying to decide between a beside safe or carrying all day in your own home. Of course, both options assume you will use a pistol for home defense and compromise the greater effectiveness of a shotgun or rifle for something that is easier to secure. Luckily innovation has provided us with hidden safes that will keep your firearms within arm’s reach while still secure and hidden in plain sight.

A hidden safe is a secure method of storing valuables or firearms in convenient locations where they would normally never be noticed. These safes are designed to look like normal furniture or decoration that would likely adorn any home, or sometimes they are built into a wall in a way that they are completely undetectable to the eye. A hidden safe appropriate for a firearm might be a coffee table, a shelf, a cabinet, or even look like a heating vent. These can either be purchased commercially or built at home if you have a moderate level of craftsmanship.

Most of these have a hidden locking method that allows you to keep your firearms not only hidden, but also secure in your absence. A common method for the locking mechanism is to use a magnet as the key, and the owner can keep the key on their person or hidden nearby so that the firearms can be accessed instantly in case of emergency.

The greatest advantage to this concept of the hidden safe is that it does lock your firearms away when they are not in use without making them completely inaccessible if they are ever needed. For those with children at home, this is a huge advantage as firearm safety becomes a great concern when curious hands are about. The myriad of options for designing or purchasing a hidden safe also makes it possible to have your rifle or shotgun ready to go as your home defense gun if you want to maximize your fire power, where as typical biometric or bedside safes are usually only large enough for a handgun.

While these safes do keep your firearms behind a lock, they are nowhere near as secure as a traditional safe. The hidden safe sacrifices the strength of the locking mechanism for speedy access to the contents within, while relying mostly upon the fact that nobody would suspect a gun to be hidden where it is. There is also the concern that if you are using this type of safe to secure your firearms away from children in the home, it is likely that said children will know your shelf is actually a safe and could easily defeat the lock if they really wanted to.

Due to the advantages and disadvantages of the hidden safe, if you own more than a couple of firearms, this should probably not be used as your primary method of storing firearms. The hidden safe will work best as a tool to keep yourself prepared to defend your home, but a more secure safe should be used for regular firearm storage.

There is definitely a time and place to use the hidden safe, and they continue to get better and better at blending into your home and securing your firearms as ingenuity drives innovation. If you decide the perfect solution for you isn’t available commercially, you can build one yourself with materials found in most hardware stores. Keeping your firearms ready to use in case of emergency is important for many homeowners, and these safes can help you to do so while also keeping them secure.