RayVoy said:
I shake my head when I read something like this.......are you actually suggesting that most instructors will tell you to store a gun loaded?
If the gun is meant for use in an emergency self defense situation, then yes, that is what most instructors will tell you. Shake your head if you want, but considering people have trouble remembering to take the safety off in high stress situations, remembering to rack the slide is not something I want to have to do. It's not going to go off by itself sitting in a safe. If you are in a situation where you need it, then it should be kept ready to fire. By the way, almost every cop you see in the country is walking around with a loaded chamber and no manual safety on their gun (assuming its a Glock, the most commonly carried firearm by law enforcement).
Again, accidents happen when people assume a gun is unloaded but it isn't. If you know your gun is always kept loaded, you will never make the mistake of assuming its unloaded.
As others have said, if you are just storing a gun long term and have a different gun you will use for self defense, then go ahead and unload it if you want.
The only caveat would be something like the older Remington 870s that the police used to carry. They have a defect of design that will cause the gun to fire if the butt stock is slammed hard enough, which would happen when the cops put them down into those vertical shotgun holders in their squad cars. After a couple of cases of people shooting holes in their squad cars' roofs, they started having cops carry shotguns without a chambered round.
Some people still do that with shotguns claiming the sound of pumping the action can scare off an intruder, but I personally don't agree for the same reasons I gave above.
Biometric scanners on safes are probably not a hot idea. If your hands are sweaty, dirty, or bloody, it will not open which could be the difference between life and death in an emergency. Additionally, depending on the model, you may be only able to have it remember one person's print, preventing the ability of your spouse to access the gun if for some reason you aren't there when there's an intruder.
There are quick access safes that are the same idea, though. They have finger grooves so you can place your hand properly even in the dark, and each finger groove has a button. You teach it a sequence of button presses to make your secret code that will pop open the safe. Then you can share that code with your spouse if desired.
And the call of duty comments aren't necessary, nor funny since that's the 1,000,000,000th time someone has said that on the internet, and I'm pretty sure you don't have to get your gun from a safe in that game so it doesn't even make sense in the context of the discussion.
