Quick-Access Gun Safe Practice

Part of being a responsible gun owner is preventing access to your firearms by unauthorized persons. One way to do this is by keeping your firearms in a quick-access gun safe at home. But putting that barrier between yourself and your home-defense tool means you need to put in the practice and repetitions to make sure that if you need to access the firearm in a home-defense scenario, you can do it quickly, efficiently, and safely.

DRILLS WITH QUICK-ACCESS GUN SAFE

PDN Contributor Barret Kendrick of Bearco Training is on the range demonstrating some shooting drills you can use to improve your response time when your firearm is in a quick-access gun safe.

And that’s what Barret recommends you do—take your quick-access gun safe to the range and practice getting your gun out of it in the way you would set it up for home defense, whether that is using a combination or if it’s set up for biometric access or RFID. Whatever your setup is, duplicate that on the range.

Barret opens the safe (he’s using a combination), takes his gun out, makes it ready, and fires shots on target. That’s just the basic drill. Add complexity and variables because that’s what you’ll probably be faced with in a home-defense scenario.

ADDING COMPLEXITY

Cognitive Processing Cards: Incorporate these cards into your drills. Access the gun from the quick-access gun safe and then flip over a card. It will tell you which targets to fire on and how many shots.

Flashlight: If you keep this in the quick-access gun safe (or outside it on the nightstand), bring that to the range as well and include it in your drills. Use it to ID potential threats as you get the gun out and make it ready.

The safe used by Barret in this video is a Vaultek.