Owning a gun is both a constitutional right in the United States and an enormous responsibility. Gun owners need to take steps to prevent firearms from falling into the wrong hands, while still ensuring easy access should the need arise. If you're a hunter or collector, you want to protect your investment as well as secure your rifles, shotguns, and pistols. Gun safes offer a solution.

If you are looking for a smaller gun safe that fits in a closet, take a look at our closet gun safes category.

Home Safe limitations

For many gun owners, a basic home safe does double duty, providing a safe location for both handguns and valuables. This is a perfectly acceptable solution, but does present a problem with accessibility. A home safe doesn't offer easy access to firearms, especially if the safe is located in an out-of-the-way corner of the house. Most handgun owners prefer to locate gun safes in their bedrooms. And, of course, rifles and shotguns simply won't fit into a standard-sized safe.

Types of Gun Safes

With this in mind, what types of gun safes will work best for you? Your choices include:

Under bed handgun safes

Gun and rifle safes and cabinets

Tactical under bed rifle safes

Hidden safes.

Under bed handgun safes are one of the most popular types of safe for guns, combining safety with accessibility. As such safes are generally small, they're also portable, making them an ideal choice for people who travel with their guns. Such safes can also be bolted to the floor or the underside of a bed for permanent storage.

Gun cabinets are tall, standalone safes designed with hunters and collectors in mind. Tactical underbed safes are essentially gun cabinets laid on their sides, so they can be tucked out of sight under a bed—an ideal choice if space precludes a standing gun cabinet.

For extra protection, consider a hidden bed safe. Built to match the dimensions of your bed, the home safe replaces your bed's box spring. Unless someone takes off the mattress, they'd never know the safe was there.

Additional Protection: Consider a Fireproof Safe

Why consider a fireproof safe for your guns? Statistically, the chance of a home fire is much higher than your risk of burglary, and even a small fire can destroy an entire firearm collection.

A fireproof safe is, more accurately, a fire-resistant safe. The safe's fire rating reveals how many minutes the safe will protect against a specific temperature—for instance, 30 minutes at 1500 degrees. Opt for the highest fire rating you can afford, as a large fireproof safe may be exposed to high temperatures for an extended time period.

In addition to a fireproof safe, consider a water-resistant gun cabinet—the fire department's water hoses can do as much damage to a gun as fire. A gun cabinet can also be equipped with the same biometric or fingerprint security systems seen on a business or home safe.

Protect your family. Protect your investment. It's the responsible choice.