Do Home Safes Really Protect Your Valuables?
Just how much security does one get by having a home safe? During a break in, do home owner with a safe really stand a smaller chance of their valuables being stolen? One of your greatest measures of security maybe keeping the knowledge that you own a safe closely safe guarded.
Why do people have a home safe? In many cases it is for fire protection of important documents. Other times it is to safe guard valuables that would not be convenient to store in a safety deposit box, such as jewelry. If your motive is the latter, then you really need to ask yourself, just how safe is having a safe?
Studies have shown that generally speaking, the chances any given home will be the subject of a break in are relatively small. Most folks in America will never experience a home break in during their life time, however nearly everyone in America will be robbed multiple times. If these robberies are not from home break-ins, what are they from? Believe it or not, most of the burglaries American’s will experience during their life time will be from folks who already have access to their home. This includes robberies from home safes. The fact is that most safes that are robbed are never broken into.
If that was not enough to give you pause, consider that majority of the actual home break-ins will not be random. Place yourself into the shoes of a professional criminal for a moment. Now you are planning your next “job”. Obviously you need to put a little time into selecting your target. You cannot just hit any house at random because with every break in comes a degree of risk that is only worth taking because of the potential payoff. As you would imagine, at least two concerns will be on your mind. The first being what risks are involved in hitting a particular house, such as do they have an alarm system? Will someone come home? etc… The other concern will be if it is even worth the effort. Does that home contain valuables worth taking the risk for? So in comes the discussion of the safe. As a professional criminal if you had a way of predicting which homes contained the greatest monetary value of high value items, this would make your selection of targets relatively easy, correct? Of course, then you need only “hit” those homes that would provide the best potential payoff. Like it or not, the best target homes would be those that they knew contained a safe.
When considering a home safe that will be used for the protection of items holding monetary value, understanding the type of safe and the planned location is just as critical as the type of safe and security rating it carries. If you would like more information on how you can protect your safe and your valuables that it contains, I invite you to visit us at http://installingafloorsafe.info. Additionally the site contains information on how to install a floor safe as well details of the safe rating systems.
Hadil,
Thank you for your feed back. Certainly the security of the safe is just as important as the safe. I certainly agree that shelve safes offer the lowest level of protection since a would be thief can easily carry these off. Please take a moment and review my article on Security through Obscurity and Floor Safe Security Considerations.
In the real world everyone has different levels of comfort when it comes to security and not everyone is willing or able to spend the money on safes of the highest degree of protection. Additionally even high end safes that can be bolted down can be removed by pri-bars or saws-all cutting tools. When it comes to protection of your valuables, you need to remember that we can never be 100% – in fact the best we can hope for is the either make it more difficult to rob us then it is worth to a would be thief's time and effort or we need to Obscure ourselves or our valuables so as to prevent them from becoming a target.
When it comes to Gun Safes – we have two very important concerns. One scenario of course is the actual theft of the weapon during a home break in. The second scenario, and most common is the gun owner that uses the weapon for protection. in this second scenario, for a weapon to be of use for protection it cannot be in the vault like safe you describe above. Unfortunately to most people, that means stuffing a loaded gun in a night stand draw or leaving it under a counter in a store. This creates a very risky situation where accidently injury can occur. To prevent this I am recommending that gun owners using a weapon for protection consider using a "quick" access safe. While you are correct many of these safe types will NOT protect well against a serious thief, but what they will prevent is mis-use of a weapon without the owners consent. Please visit again and please feel free to comment
Bob