There are plenty of inexpensive safes out there that claim to safely store guns away from children and there are even more videos on Youtube explaining how to easily open these same safes. Anybody remotely interested in opening such safes has been aware for more than a decade that many of these safes are not suitable for safely keeping guns locked up. They do however protect people in places like Seattle and Los Angeles from being liable for crimes committed with their guns if they are stolen: these and other places legally require you to lock your firearms up.
The CSPC recommends destroying the keypad and using a key to unlock the safe.
I have watched biometric locks proliferate. I hold my breath when installing such locks for customers. I tell them from the get-go that the biometric features may stop working or may not work very exclusively and unlock for people not even registered with the lock, and to definitely not call me expecting any kind of warranty from me if the lock stops working.
Inexpensive Chinese biometric doorknobs off of Amazon are one thing, but a 200 Ibs biometric safe failing is quite another. The first one can be mailed back to Amazon for a refund or simply thrown away if the customer decides to swallow their mistake and move on. The second will cost a lot of money to send anywhere. You will probably have to pay for a special truck with a lift gate to come pick it up. If you want to get rid of it yourself, you might be in for a surprise: the city dump might not accept safes. Back in the good old days they used to use asbestos for fireproofing material in safes and that can create a cancerous cloud of toxic dust if somebody with a bulldozer crushes a safe full of it. They also used to put tear gas cannisters in safe doors and nobody wants to get exposed to tear gas.
So it is a bit of a headache getting rid of old safes. (That might be why the magnet fishing channels on Youtube often recover safes near bridges over large rivers) If you are going to get a safe, spend a little extra. You don’t want to take chances on the thing because it is such an investment getting it to your location and then installing it. Many safe installers charge hundreds of dollars to come out and bolt a safe down into concrete floor or attach lag bolts into the floor studs.
If you really want to get a safe with biometric capabilities, you should probably get a container that will accept an aftermarket safe lock. That way if the biometric features fail you can always replace the lock with one that has more reliable biometric features or go back to an old school dial lock.
