How a 3-Year-Old Can Open a Gun Safe 646
New submitter bupbin writes "We are providing a detailed report and analysis of eleven different popular gun safes produced by Stack-On, GunVault, and Bulldog to warn the public of the dangers inherent in some of these products because the manufacturers nor their major retailers will do so. In that report you can view eight different Stack-On models, one produced by Bulldog, and one manufactured by GunVault. A similar design defect is demonstrated in an inexpensive safe for storing valuables that is sold by AMSEC, a very reputable safe manufacturer in the United States. Unfortunately, their digital safe with their claim of a 'state-of-the-art electronic lock' can also be opened (literally) by a three-year-old because of a common mechanism used in the industry that is subject to circumvention."
Re:gun safe? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying the best way not to die in a car accident is to bike to work.
Re:gun safe? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do governments always resort to coverup? (Score:5, Insightful)
QUOTE: "Ed Owens began voicing concerns about the security of these containers and that every other officer within the Department might be at risk. As a result, he was subsequently fired after fifteen months for allegedly violating department policies."
Oh yeah. Hide the problem instead of facing it head-on and dealing with it. Damn politicians.
Re:Loaded gun? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:News For Nerds??!! (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this really news for nerds?
It doesn't specify compter nerds, does it? There are plenty of gun nerds out there.
In any case, it follows up yesterday's story about hotel room door locks nicely - same theme (poor physical security measures), different instance.
Re:News For Nerds??!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News For Nerds??!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Locks are designed by engineers. (Nerds)
Shooting is an Olympic Sport (Score:5, Insightful)
A gun is designed to kill other things ...
No. They can also be designed or used for putting holes in pieces of paper, knocking over or pinging metal plates, breaking pieces of clay, etc. Shooting is also a sport. Given that slashdot seems to be on a current events theme I'll add that shooting is an Olympic Sport.
Re:As a father (Score:5, Insightful)
Shotgun, with rounds only in the tube. A child young enough to not be taught firearm safety will not be able to cycle the pump.
Same thing with a big semi-auto pistol. A 3 year old will never be able to rack the slide.
I still suggest keeping them in a safe of course, and just keep the safe in the bedroom.
Utterly useless design (Score:5, Insightful)
That locking mechanism is just atrocious. They thought using a single solenoid which when actuated retracts to allow the bolts to be withdrawn was a secure design in a safe the size of a shoebox? Add in that because it is battery powered it can't have a strong return spring and of course it will be easy to open by giving it a small physical shock. FFS even something simple like a bolt driven by a small stepper motor and a worm gear would be orders of magnitude better.
That the company and distributors are refusing to admit there is a problem is disgusting, but understandable given how large the potential liability is in this situation.
Not News (Score:5, Insightful)
Locksmiths have been using these exact techniques for 20 years to open safes. This is nothing new nor secret. What's next, a video of a security consultant picking a deadbolt in 20 seconds?
First off, safes (which store anything) should be bolted into the foundation of your home. Therefore the pick-up-and-drop method is ineffective. A sturdy strike from a hammer may open some of them, but not all.
Second, none of these are real "gun safes". A real gun safe weighs 300 lbs. and cannot be opened using any of these methods. You need a large drill and a schematic of the inside of the door. These lock boxes are intended to be hidden somewhere (back of a closet, behind a bed) and allow for quick access (15 seconds to open) in the event of an emergency. Kids should not know where they are, nor be able to reach them. A real gun owner would know this.
Re:My little sister picked my BB gun's trigger loc (Score:4, Insightful)
The trick is to teach kids how to handle the gun so that you take away the mystery. When I grew up we had guns in the house and not locked up at all. My dad's shotgun and hunting rifle generally were leaning up in a corner. No trigger locks. If he'd been hunting earlier that day they may very well be loaded.
It was like that from birth till I moved out. Wanna know why me and my siblings didn't die horrible deaths? Because we didn't feel a need to secretly "play" with the gun. If I wanted to go out and shoot it all I had to do was ask and my dad would take me out shooting. Not only that, but during those shooting sessions he taught me exactly how the gun worked, how to safely load and unload it, and how to handle it. Even if I HAD handled the gun while he was gone I was perfectly capable to doing so safely.
As they say: if you have a pool in the backyard, which do you think would be more effective: Putting a fence around it, or teaching your kids to swim?
Re:As a father (Score:4, Insightful)
A baseball bat is more useful than martial arts training. Gives you some reach and doesn't require any skill. Dogs that aren't professionally trained are mostly just good as alarms, and their false positive rate is horrendous.
Re:Simple flaw. (Score:5, Insightful)
In your universe hammers do not exist?
Re:Simple flaw. (Score:4, Insightful)
The safes should be designed such that they cannot be used until those bolts are in place, perhaps similar to how smoke detectors have a small lever arrangement so they cannot be installed in their bracket if you don't have a battery in them. It isn't exactly a secret that a sizable number of people (perhaps even the majority for the smallest safes) don't bother to bolt the safes down.
If something is a safety-critical requirement for the operation of the device then it should be designed in a way that the device will not operate without it.
Re:My little sister picked my BB gun's trigger loc (Score:5, Insightful)
The most effective thing to do would be to do both.
Which is what my parents did. Safes for the guns, ammo in another place and plenty of range time for the kids.
Re:News For Nerds??!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Its related to security and the idea that "apparent security" and "actual security" are two distinct concepts.
There are a TON of parallels with the software security industry, where sometimes a vendor simply refuses to respond to a notification of an exploit, which leaves the researcher to go to the media and perform a full disclosure in order to force the vendor's hand so to speak. In this case, the researchers reached out to the manufacturer and walmart, and got no response, so they are spilling the beans to the public.
It is a particularly good submission because its not an anti-gun or pro-gun screed; its legitimate research about a legitimate issue that is being handled irresponsibly by the vendor, and now its up to the news-reading public to bring that vendor to task by avoiding their products until such time as they take responsibility for and address these kind of "vulnerabilities".
Re:gun safe? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to take away from your sentiment about the OP blaming the tools, but some areas it is indeed necessary... however, in the absolutely, unfathomably larger vast majority of the population it is not. I'd honestly be surprised if people in the USA for whom it's absolutely necessary to shoot animals to live was a percentage higher than .000001. So trying to use that as 'not just recreation and self defense' is stupid. That's like trying to equate the number of people that absolutely need to specifically canoe to work has a bearing on how the rest of the population gets to work.
Re:what is a "gun safe"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most "safes" that you see in your average retail store are just locked cabinets. Well, they usually have fancier locks, but a hasp and padlock would work better.
I'm giving someone one of my old safes. It looked similar to the first one, so I decided to try the drop test. It didn't open. They need it to keep a single firearm, and some papers, away from a 3 year old. I found it oddly coincidental that this story came up now. The one I'm giving away is sitting on my floor waiting for me to take it over and mount it.
When I was reading reviews on the "economy" safes (like anything under $200), quite a few are easily defeated. Some can be opened by just jiggling the handle until it opens (about 3 seconds). Some take a screwdriver to pop the dial off (combination lock).
I want a nice rifle safe. After look at the prices, I'm tempted to build my own. If you have welding and machining skills, you could craft one pretty easily. Double layer steel (inner and outer shell), with a few inches of concrete make for a respectable vault. Then you have to make the bolt mechanism, which takes a little more thinking.
Jamming the bolt mechanism so it won't open, is the hardest part. You can't exactly use a residential deadbolt. There are plenty of ways to open those in seconds with little skill. (lockpick gun, bump key, lockpick rake, etc).
It would take me time, but I could build something that would normally cost thousands.
I picked my first lock when I was about 8 years old. I had a toy that needed a key to open a panel. I had lost the key long before, so I got it open with a paperclip and small screwdriver, acting as a rake and tensioner.
I know people who want to keep guns in those cheap moneyboxes. They change their mind when I show them that I can pick the lock in seconds, or force it open with a screwdriver. Come on... Why protect a $600 gun with a $15 lockbox?
Now roll the dice a million times (Score:4, Insightful)
... in the same way and tell me that no other kid would ever do something stupid with a loaded gun. Like most accidents, stupid shit often happens because more than one thing went wrong. Your dad was called away at an emergency, you had some friends over but had to go to the bathroom... this is why most "safe" designs require a two point failure on top of a system designed with best practices. Leaving a loaded gun around is a single point of failure with a lot of assumptions built-in.
You live in a pretty black-and-white world that allows for no statistical variation. Humans, if anything, do not all act exactly the same under the same circumstances.
Re:As a father (Score:4, Insightful)
If your children are capable of getting into one of these safes, they are capable of being taught not to mess with daddy's guns.
There are ~ 50 million households with guns in them. Accidental gun deaths by children (most of whom were not educated on guns by their parents, and found access to completely unlocked guns) are in the range of 200-300 a year. ie, not even appearing on the top list of accidental causes of child death.
In short, teach your children, and get a quick open safe that requires some strong intent to open. This is almost entirely a non-issue with basic precautions.
Just FYI - the first google search you will make for children killed by gunshots will come up with a much higher number, because the Brady campaign defines "children" as anyone up to 19. Including teenage gang members shot while running drugs. While their deaths are also a tragedy, they are not relevant to whether your 3-year-old is going to try to sneak into your gun safe to play.
Re:gun safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, those statistics are idiotic. Perhaps people that are about to commit suicide go out and buy a gun? Perhaps people that live in high murder rate areas buy and carry more guns?
And of course, the #1 - gang members are the majority of gun murders, both giving and receiving. And, of course, they carry guns.
Uncontrolled statistics do not convey useful information.
Re:they aren't safes (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the truth. I do not expect a $100 safe to keep out a world-class safe cracker, or even stop an adult with power tools, but I **SHOULD** expect it to stop a 6-year-old.
The purpose of a safe is to protect the contents from anything, including fire, flood, tornado, as well as the occasional thief. The porpose of a lockbox is simply to stop a child from accessing the contents. That is the ONE REASON for a gun lock box, and apparently, they cannot do even that one thing right.
Re:My little sister picked my BB gun's trigger loc (Score:5, Insightful)
"As they say: if you have a pool in the backyard, which do you think would be more effective: Putting a fence around it, or teaching your kids to swim?"
You should teach your kids to swim. But since you can't control whether the neighbors teach their kids to swim, you should still have a fence.
Same thing applies to guns in the home. Even if your kids are perfectly safe around the guns, you need to be cognisant that their friends may not have the same education. You really don't want to find yourself in the position of saying "it's not my fault that the neighbor kid accidentally shot himself with my gun, his parents should have taught him gun safety". Not only will the jury not be very interested in that argument when the parents sue you, but I imagine you'd feel bad if the neighbor kid killed himself with your gun. (Even if you would believe it wasn't your "fault", I imagine you'd still wish it hadn't happened.)
Re:gun safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
There were no significant differences between those with only handguns in the home and those with only long guns or both handguns and long guns, those with two or more guns, and those having one gun in the household; and between those who stored one or more guns unlocked and those who stored all guns locked (table 6).
The suicide rate wasn't lower for people with multiple guns or for people who kept their guns locked, so I don't think the data supports the hypothesis that the suicide weapon was purchased for the purpose of suicide.
To the "people who live in bad neighborhoods get guns" most of the second article is about that point and how to disentangle all the different predictive factors behind getting shot. I'm sure there's some truth to "people who are planning on entering a dangerous situation carry", but there's also some truth to "if you try and draw while you're getting mugged, you're gonna get shot." In support of that, note that having a gun increases your risk of geting shot even more for "assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist"
Sad truth is that if you try to resist a crime, you generally place yourself in more danger than if you passively submit. I'm not saying that recommends any particular course of action. Personally, I hope to act bravely, even if it puts me in danger, though my soon-to-arrive child might change that opinion. We shouldn't let the ethical question of how to respond to violence obscure the fact that going for your gun does not make you safer. Escalating a robbery to a gunfight is a risky move--why does stating that fairly obvious fact upset people?