True confessions: at SHOT Show this year, I gathered up a lot of information about different types of lockboxes for storing firearms. My goal was to get a few pages going on the Cornered Cat website on this topic. But because I refuse to write about things I don’t know, it’s taken me longer than I anticipated to pull that material together. I mean, I can always describe what I see. I could tell you “This box has blah, blah blah features…” but I don’t really have the mechanical background to judge whether something’s really secure or not. So I was studying up on lockboxes before writing about them, because I refuse to write about things I don’t know.

Turns out my caution has been well-warranted. Check out this article about “gun safes” (he means lock boxes, not full-size gun safes) by Marc Tobias at Forbes. It is lengthy, and absolutely worth the time it will take to read. Turns out that a lot of the best-known products have some security holes that concern him. There’s even a video of a three-year-old child easily breaking into some of those products.

After you’ve read that and digested it, you may also want to view the following video. This was a presentation given at a hacker convention (DefCon) in Las Vegas in 2011. It will take about 15 minutes of your time. Oh, and there are a few cuss words during the speech, so you may want to wait until the boss is out of the room before you hit the play button.

I’ll have more to say about this later, but let me tell you one thing right now: Mechanical devices can fail. No matter how you choose to secure your firearms, you must educate your children when you have guns in the home. Failing to do so can leave a gaping hole in your family’s security system, no matter where the guns are stored.