How do you secure your handguns in a vehicle? Look, the days of tossing your Colt 1903 in the glovebox are long gone. One of the last things anyone wants to do is call 911 because their car was broken into and their gun is gone.
In several NRA courses there are great tips on vehicle storage. The Firearm Safety Seminar, Home Firearm Safety, First Steps Pistol, Basics of Pistol Shooting and the NRA CCW course all address this issue.
The first and most basic idea is to put your handgun in a locked box of some type. It’s important to secure the box with a cable system. One type I’m very familiar with allows enough length on the security cable to string it around the base frame of a front seat of a car or truck, then padlock it in place. The cable is retained on one side of the box and cannot be yanked out with anything less than 1,500 pounds of pull.
There’s a new way to do the same thing. Built into a seat car headrest, The Headrest Safe Company has a unique product that secures a handgun in plain sight. On one side, the headrest assembly opens, and a lockable container slides into place. A firearm owner only needs to put their gun inside and lock the container, then leave the vehicle knowing that their gun is safe.
Astute readers may be thinking, “but Todd, you can just pull out a headrest from a car seat assembly. The bad guys will just pull out the headrests when they break in and take it apart later”. Honestly, I had the same thought.
Instead, these folks came up with a toggle bolt system that secures the headrest to the seat. You have to unlock it and unscrew a port from the inside of the headrest in order to pull it off the seat assembly. Your firearm can be placed into the portable locking safe and then slid into place inside the headrest.
The only downside I can see is if your leather seat isn’t black in color. They offer a brown color, but it’s iffy if it’s going to match your car’s version of brown. It’s still a nice option that has been well engineered.
By the way, once again please tell your shooting buddies to make sure they are registered to vote in the General Election in November. As we found out in the last U.S. Senate race, every vote matters. If 150,000 gun owners voted for someone other than the now-junior Senator from our state, the election outcome would have been quite different.
Todd Ellis – President