In-Vehicle Firearms Storage

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. Now, we've looked at carrying on our person, and getting in and out of the vehicle all day. Maybe switching between carrying on a person and hard pointing a holster somewhere inside of our vehicle or having some other off body carry or even changing location that we carry the firearm on our person to another location that's more convenient for not only the comfort of carrying but also the speed and efficiency of deploying the firearm when we're going to be seated in the car. You may have come to the conclusion that the best thing to do is just keep a firearm in the car. Now, there are a lot of considerations when we talk about actually storing a firearm inside of a vehicle.

Of course, you want to be a responsible firearms owner. You want to do something practical in terms of being able to defend yourself with that firearm inside the vehicle, if that's the reason you want it there, and we have to take those considerations and balance them. Of course, the idea of keeping a firearm inside of a car may be absolutely unacceptable to some of you out there. Others may do it all the time and not think twice about it. If you parked your car inside of a locked garage at home.

If you're inside of a garage in your workplace and you know that it may be secure, maybe there's security, maybe it's a locked typical garage where a door comes down and there's no access except for you and people you trust near your vehicle. You may not think about it at all and it may be fine to keep a firearm inside your vehicle. On the other hand, if you park on a city street, if you're out at the mall, if you're different places, different times of day and night, you may think the last thing you'd be responsible to do is keep a firearm in the car. That's a decision that you're going to have to make. It's going to have to be an educated decision.

And of course, in some jurisdictions it may be illegal to keep a firearm under certain conditions inside of your vehicle. Whether that means it's loaded, whether it's outside of a locked safe, whether it's assembled, may be a problem. So taking all these things into consideration, if you decide to keep a firearm inside of your vehicle, let's take a look at some of the ways you might, and maybe, might not want to do it. Once we're inside the vehicle, one of the things that we've seen countless times in movies and television shows, and maybe we've even done ourselves, is, of course, keep the firearm in the glove box. Let's think about the practical issues of keeping the firearm inside of the glove compartment.

If we had a dynamic critical incident, if I saw a threat somewhere close to me outside of the vehicle, or even inside the vehicle, the idea of reaching across my vehicle opening the glove compartment and getting to the firearm may or may not be an easy, plausible thing to actually do. And of course, if you're like me, you probably have a bunch of other things inside your glove compartment besides the firearm that would either get in the way or get maybe even into the trigger area of the firearm which we certainly wouldn't want. So just throwing that revolver or any other firearm loosely into the glove compartment, probably not the best idea. Even putting one inside of a holster inside of the glove box, probably isn't the most practical idea, or the fastest way to be able to get to the firearm. You know, another thing that I've seen over the years is the idea of taking a universal clip on type holster or a paddle holster.

Anything that's designed to go on the belt, fit in a lot of different ways. Something that may be even can be left or right-handed, and finding a place to put it inside the vehicle where you can attach it. I've seen everything from up on the visor to in between the seat and the console next to you even including throwing it back here on the map pocket of the passenger seat. Of course, it's only easy once you've had the time, space, and opportunity to reach into the passenger compartment around the back of the passenger seat, get your hand on the firearm in a good shooting grip, as much as you can and then coming up out of the holster. And the fact is that may or may not be easy to do under the circumstances in which you actually need the firearm.

Now, another thing that you might consider when it comes to one of these universal clip on type holsters inside of the vehicle, is actually using this holster as your primary carry when you're out in public every day, maybe attaching it to your belt somewhere, obviously five o'clock or three o'clock, four o'clock carry somewhere like that. The way it's set up right now, or reversing it for an inside the waistband. Whatever you decide to do, one of the nice things about these types of clips is that when you remove this holster and you get into your vehicle, you might have a map pocket or some type of a cargo pocket on your actual door which is convenient for carrying the firearm. Now you won't have to worry about carrying the firearm on your body and it will be relatively close to you should you need it. In fact, if we take a look at the way this works, when we're here with the firearm clipped into this type of a door pocket, the presentation is actually going to be very much like cross draw.

Now, the firearm is not attached to you, obviously. You have to go a little further, coming all the way down into the door area. And then if you were getting out of the vehicle in the position I'm in now, we could actually remove the entire firearm and holster, or we could rely on the friction presented by that clip to just reach down and grab the firearm and pull it out of the holster. That of course would work while the door was closed and while we were seated, also. Doesn't get in the way of the seatbelt.

You don't have to worry about any of that. So this would be a consideration for taking the firearm off of your body and keeping in the vehicle, storing it in the vehicle while you were actually here driving or sitting inside the vehicle. The fact is, when we talk about long-term storage of a firearm inside of a vehicle, there are some safe and responsible ways to do it. But most of them aren't going to be in the passenger compartment. Let's take a look at the trunk options that we might have when it comes to storing a firearm inside a vehicle.

Of course, the most secure place in any standard passenger vehicle is going to be the trunk. If you want to store a firearm permanently in your vehicle that's probably the best place to do it. Obviously, you're not going to be able to react to an ambush while you're driving, while you're seated in the passenger compartment, with any effectiveness, with the firearm that stored in the trunk. However, if you have a plausible situation where you feel like there may be some type of warning, you may have time to get to a firearm, or you want to have a firearm with you at your workplace but you can't actually bring it into the workplace, the trunk is probably the best place to actually store that firearm as a safe, responsible firearm owner. Let's take a look at some of the ways we can do it.

Of course, one of the simplest ways is just going to be to have the case that the firearm came in. The same one that you brought it home from the gun shop in, certainly can adequately store the firearm inside of the trunk. Keeps it from rattling around and getting dirty, getting caught up under something else. It's going to keep the trigger protected. Of course, you probably wouldn't keep a loaded firearm in the trunk, you'd probably have maybe the magazine loaded, maybe even inserted into the firearm.

You probably wouldn't have a round chambered. You come back to the trunk and you can simply open up your case, boom. Your firearms there. It's ready to go, chamber a round. Now, one of the problems with this, however, of course, is that it's not very secure once the trunk is open or if someone has access to your vehicle.

Maybe at a valet situation, you valet the vehicle, the person can simply pop the trunk, open it up. And there's really no doubt about what's going to be inside of this box. One of the best ways to fix that is to actually have a dedicated, secure, lockable safe or box compartment inside of your vehicle. Now several companies make them, there are ones that slide out of the back of your trucks, or ones that are made to go under your seats. There are obviously even ones for the passenger compartment.

The one that we've got here is actually a GunVault biometric safe, and it's actually tuned to read my fingerprint, when it reads it, it opens up and lets me access the firearm. Now, the firearm is secure inside of that box. It could be loaded, of course, in this case it's not. Maybe I have a loaded magazine inside of that box, or I have a loaded magazine even inside the firearm. And when I retrieved the firearm from the box I'm then going to make sure that magazine's in there, rack the slide, chamber a round, put it in a holster.

I have it in the ready position, whatever it is I may want to do. So a lockable box is a great way to keep a firearm secure inside of your vehicle. You might even keep a long gun inside of some of the longer, larger options that you could have inside of a trunk or inside of maybe the back end of an SUV. Let's take a look at this bag while we're here. Talk about storing a long gun.

This bag is actually one that's designed to carry a long gun, carry a firearm, to be rapidly deployable from inside of this case and not look like it's actually a firearm. This may be a situation where you could keep your firearm inside of this bag in the trunk, when you're not with the vehicle. When you come to the vehicle, you simply take it out and put it on the back seat, put it on the passenger seat with you where it's actually in the passenger compartment. This gives you the option of a casual observer walking by your car or someone walking by at a stop light or anyone else that you may be interacting with while you're inside the vehicle. Maybe even passengers that are in the vehicle with you that don't know you have a firearm simply thinking that this might be a musical instrument or, you know, a computer case, maybe a skateboard.

Maybe you're a skateboarder, if you have kids who are skateboarders that's kind of what this looks like. If you just kind of say, well, gee I wonder what's inside of that bag. But the fact is that what's actually inside of this bag is a full-size M4 type, AR-15 rifle. This one happens to be scoped. This one happens to not have a magazine in it.

Of course, there's magazines inside the case. We can then load the firearm, chamber a round, and be ready to go with whatever it was we wanted to do to, defend ourselves or our family with this rifle, if appropriate. So, the nice thing about this bag, the sneaky bag, is that it doesn't look like it contains a firearm and you might be comfortable even in that valet situation with that bag sitting inside of here not revealing or calling out to anyone that you actually have a firearm. When it comes to keeping a firearm securely inside of your vehicle, there are a lot of different ways you can about it. Thinking carefully, thinking about your actual situation, thinking about the situation that your vehicle is in when you're not there, when that vehicle is unintended, are all part of that picture.

Once you have a clear picture and you've decided to keep a firearm inside your vehicle, do it responsibly, do it securely and take into consideration some of the things we've talked about. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.