Child friendly gun storage options

I ask this becasue I have been to friends houses that litterally have the CCW handgun laying in the center of a very large dining room table, and once again we have a "tragic" kid shot themselves thread here.

While having a safe and wearing the only gun outside of the safe is close to Idea

What other options, or should you even consider anything other than that if you wish to have a gun readily accessible?

Responsible parenting, depending on the age of the kids, leaving a gun out on a table may not be the best idea, better to keep it on you.

Gun safety training. Remove the curiosity:

Eddie Eagle video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIEBrb_wRYc)

Cornered Cat: Disarming Her Curiosity (http://www.corneredcat.com/Kids/firstlesson.aspx)

Fast access lock boxes:
GunVault (http://www.gunsafes.com/GunVault.html)
Stack-On (less expensive) (http://www.amazon.com/Stack-QAS-1304-Profile-Access-Electronic/dp/B0013LO0F6/ref=sr_1_26?ie=UTF8&s=hi&qid=1272055672&sr=8-26)

Trigger locks SUCK, badly.

If the firearm is a revolver, it's easy to open the cylinder and lock an appropriately shanked padlock over the top strap. The cylinder can't be closed, and therefore the gun can't be fired. If you use a short cable lock, the cable can be locked both around the top strap and something like an eye bolt. The advantage of a cable lock is that it can be locked through the ejection port and down the magazine well of a semi-auto pistol with the slide locked back. And again, it can be fixed to something immovable.

Education, first and foremost. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIEBrb_wRYc) All my kids can recite this - the 4yo in his sleep - although the 9yo thinks the presentation is, "for babies".

Next, mounting one of these (http://www.gunvault.com/) in an inconspicuous place might balance precaution with prevention.

HTH

Educate instead of locking it up. It lasted a lifetime and your kids may have save their own lives or your's. It's happened before.

Education is the key
Someone here has the sig line of
"I childproofed my house, and they are still getting in"

That is pretty much my feeling on the subject,
But I still have a gun vault so nothing is out for little hands to get to, I think it would irresponsible for me to leave a pistol where my 2 year-old can get to it. Beside getting my a lecture from my Irate wife. However I think that having to lock it in a CAL DOJ rated safe is little too far, and does nothing to address what your child should do if they are at someone else's house and someone 'finds' a gun.

I think the better question to ask is how do you prevent kids that aren't your's from getting their hands on your firearms when they're in your home. That means you must assume that you're dealing with kids that have not been trained on even the basic "don't touch, tell an adult" approach to children's firearms safety.

What recourse do you have but to lock firearms you're not carrying away, then?

None

So you're problem becomes one of having a firearm secured in such a way that it's readily available to you.

So you're problem becomes one of having a firearm secured in such a way that it's readily available to you.

Gunvault is a nice solution. Quick access to the firearm, but secure from little hands. I agree with the above posts in educating the kids. Mine are fine as for those who are not mine, they are never left unsupervised in our house, never!

How do you prevent kids that aren't your's from getting their hands on your firearms when they're in your home.

I agree when friends are there lock em' up. I'm the kid of the family(15), and even I would rather haven't locked up. It's impossible to always watch a friend when he is over, and it only takes a few seconds for him to do something stupid. That said I do have a couple friends that I can trust with that kinda thing, but those are the same guys I go shooting with.:)

Remember, the solutions are not necessarily exclusive of one another.

I keep a pistol safe.....

The rest get locked & stored seperate from ammo.

We're about to have a baby in a couple months, so we've been thinking about this a bunch lately (so please forgive the long-winded-ness of my response).

I converted an unused linen closet into a gun closet (essentially just put a locking door knob on there) which has a motion detector wired into my alarm system looking at it. Only guns are stored in there (no ammo). Most of my ammo (that which isn't actually loaded in a gun) is in dry boxes that have their own separate pad locks all keyed the same (which are stored in an entirely different closet).

I do have two loaded pistols in the house and I leave one in my truck. Both in the house are in Gun Vault vaults (one in a "MicroVault" in the nightstand and one in a "NanoVault" in a section of our entertainment center/armoir type thing in the living room - MicroVault has a finger type combination that's better for use in the dark; NanoVualt has a more traditional combo lock which is fine for the living room because it's less likely to be used in total darkness). The one in the truck is in a Console Vault (which, for those of you that like to leave a firearm in the vehicle, I HIGHLY recommend - http://consolevault.com/ - mine's one of the ones built for my truck's console, and it's completely hidden and looks like something that came stock with the truck and was a breeze to install) which I unlock every time I get in the truck and lock it back when I get out.

It may seem like a bit of overkill, but this is really the bare minimum for me in terms of being able to have access to loaded firearms for protective purposes, but still having them as safe as I can.

Also, I really highly buy into the fact that no matter how safe you keep your guns, you should still teach gun safety to (at least) your kids as soon as they're old enough to be able to understand it. Worked for me and my sister when we were kids. We always knew where the loaded guns were in the house growing up, and neither of us did anything stupid or careless with them because we were taught how to handle them safely if/when necessary.

As hso pointed out, one side of the coin is your kids, and the other are children that are friends of your youngsters.

Children between the ages of 2 through 12 can be easily defeated by simply putting a lock on a closet door in the parent's bedroom. Any loaded guns should be on the owner's person or under lock & key.

A lock on a closet door is simple and inexpensive. Any concerned parent can afford it, and the closet should be big enough to store all kinds of firearms.

By age 12 and older, education should have kicked in, but if you think they (and they're friends) won't be stopped by the locked closet it time to get a safe - if you haven't done so already. Firearms that aren't kept for protection purposes should be unloaded and stored in locked cases.

As mentioned I didn't worry about mine as she understood the rules and followed them from very early on.

To this day (she is 16) we take precautions when others are at the house