The citizens of the United States are the most heavily-armed on the planet, with over 500 million firearms owned by around 120 million people. Even to seasoned firearms owners, those numbers are surprising. But it’s easy to see how we got here.
Buying guns is a lot like getting a tattoo. You get a Tasmanian Devil on your butt in college and before you know it you’re head to toe in skulls and flames and ‘Mom’ hearts. Whether you buy or build your first AR-15, you’ll undoubtedly get bit by “the bug” and start building an even bigger collection. Maybe you want to build another AR-15 in a different caliber. Maybe you grab another shotgun — just because you can. Maybe you’ll diversify your pistol lineup and get a .45 ACP 1911. You might even inherit some firearms from Uncle Jimmy.
But where do you plan to put all that stuff?
(Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/filmeditor-christmas-movies-vacation-l0ErTUZmOUt9RZQYw)
For some people, a stout safe or residential security container (RSC) will do the job. These can usually hold, realistically, 4 or 5 long guns, maybe an equivalent number of pistols, and room left over for some ammo. It won’t take long for your humble safe to get pretty crowded, and pulling out a single gun might look like knocking over a row of dominoes. Not only will this damage the collection you’ve worked so hard to acquire, it’s also unsafe, especially if your guns are loaded.
The fact is, you need a way to secure your firearms collection while still giving them room to breathe. You need a gun room.
Yes, it’s just as awesome as it sounds. But, it’s more than a room full of guns and ammo, elegantly displayed and ready for action. A well-designed gun room provides several advantages including:
- Secure access to guns, ammo, gear, and more
- More workspace for firearms maintenance
- A space that’s 100% your own
If you have the privilege of building and designing a room like this, it will be one of the most rewarding experiences. Let’s take a look at the best tips for designing the ultimate sanctuary of the free citizen: the gun room.
Gun Rooms 101: The Essentials
A well-planned gun room is part secure storage solution, part gunsmith area, and part Second Amendment sanctuary. If you have a few firearms, a dedicated gun room solves many problems.
- Security - Your gun room should have plenty of secure storage including a few safes, a few locked cases with transparent fronts, a few locking racks, etc.
- Maintenance - With a gun room, you have dedicated space for a large work bench, with all your cleaning solutions, parts, and tools on hand. No more commandeering the kitchen table and leaving the smell of Hoppes lingering in the air at dinnertime. In a gun room, you can also bring in proper work lighting, allowing for more meticulous inspections and maintenance of your firearms.
- Personality - You should also customize the space to your liking. Maybe your aesthetic is minimalist — guns and gear only. Maybe this is your one place to put up edgy posters and art. In the end, it should be a true expression of your firearms collection.
(Source: GUNMEN - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b38VFRhkuGk)
Designing Your Gun Room
Whether you hire an architect or design your own gun room, keep in mind it’s more than a place to conveniently store your collection. Security should be the driving force in your gun room design. Your firearms represent a significant financial investment, and there is always the potential for misuse if they fall into the wrong hands. When you design a gun room, you’re creating a room-sized safe or vault.
Doors, Locks, and Walls
To ensure maximum security, you will need a vault-style door with a method of controlled access. Most major US safe companies such as Fort Knox also manufacture dedicated vault doors. While electronic locks are nice, they are vulnerable to hacking (via supply-chain attacks or backdoors) so you’re best served by a mechanical lock.
However, a vault door serves no purpose if thieves can break through the wall or ceiling to get at your home armory. Do consider the construction and location of the room itself. Ideally, your home armory should be located in a place that can support not only the weight of the vault door, but that of the walls and ceiling as well. In most cases, this means the walls should be concrete, cinder block, or brick. When designing, also consider you might need to run power cables, communications lines, HVAC, and plumbing to your new room.
What Else Should Go in Your Gun Room?
At this point, your gun room may seem like a panic room. (But why panic when you’ve got wall-to-wall firepower?). Both rooms share characteristics, so you may as well equip accordingly. Think of it as a miniature bunker that you can outfit it for survival needs as well.
- Surveillance - Consider investing in a quality surveillance system to keep tabs on the room and its environment when you aren’t present. This will also allow you to see the outside world if the unthinkable happens and you and your family have to seek shelter. Purchase a surveillance system (usually called a network video recorder or NVR) with ample local storage and the ability to store footage to an offsite location of your choosing.
- Survival Gear - Stock the room with a cache of survival items such as food (and food storage), backup power, medical supplies, water, spare clothing, toiletries, and even basic entertainment like books and games. You could be holed up for some time, after all.
- Comms - Thirdly, you’ll want a way to talk to the outside world. In addition to standard wired Ethernet and wireless internet access, invest in “off grid” communications such as a two-way VHF/UHF radio.
- Furniture - Since you'll undoubtedly be spending a lot of time in your Second Amendment sanctuary, make it comfortable and inviting. The styling options are all up to you. A must is a comfortable couch for yourself and your friends. Consider recliners, fold-out chairs, and other furniture as well. Forget the dubious pleasure of flat-pack furniture (e.g. IKEA-branded items). While fine for the rest of the house, these items are notorious for failing over time. The heavy weight of firearms and ammunition can prove catastrophic for these cheap items. Invest in quality furniture and shelving, and don’t forget the 4K flat screen TV.
- Aesthetics - Americana with flags, Bettie Page posters, and an extensive vinyl collection? Or are you more of a John Wick-at-the-Continental type with a dark and exciting flair? Or will your gun room be all business, resembling a military armory with Gallowtech gun walls, technical manuals galore, and a small shrine to R Lee Ermey? The choice is yours. Add a good rug to really tie the room together.
(Source: https://www.gallowtech.com/images/66399913_913101005699983_1302368494222087308_n.jpg)
Gun Storage Solutions
Now, it's time to consider the “gun stuff.” Of course, you’ll want sturdy work tables to lay everything out on, dedicated work solutions like a Tipton Gun Vise, and things like gun cabinets, safes, ammunition storage, and tool cabinets.
A gun room is more than a place where you toss your guns, lock the door, and go about your business. It’s a safe and secure sanctuary for your Second Amendment lifestyle. You’ve invested good money in that collection, so go the extra mile and dedicate some resources to the secure storage and display of your arsenal.
Gun Walls
Yes, gun walls are a thing.
One of the biggest manufacturers of gun walls is Gallow Technologies, aka Gallowtech. More than just a pegboard for guns, Gallowtech walls are an aesthetically pleasing method of displaying your firearms and keeping them accessible. They offer a slew of customization options, from preconfigured racks to individual pieces so you can easily build your dream gun wall from scratch.
A more common option is to purchase slatwalls, common in retail outlets and gun shops. Budgets will dictate your choices somewhat, with slat walls being a little cheaper.
PRO TIP: Keep an eye out for stores closing. Sometimes you can get slat walls for pennies on the dollar.
Gun walls aren’t a secure storage method all by themselves. If you opt for only gun walls for display, without safes, you’ll need to design the entire gun room as “the safe.”
Gun Cabinets
If your gun collection trends towards the vintage and traditional aesthetic, look into gun cabinets to store (and adequately frame) those pieces of history. If you have a consignment of M1 Garands, or even some Kar98s from World War II, they would look out of place on a slatwall or gun wall.
You should be able to easily acquire gun cabinets from estate sales, online auction sites, or via word-of-mouth in your local gun collector community. The wood treatments and glass panels of a solid gun cabinet will go a long way in complementing your pieces of history.
Gun Racks
If your collection tends to be more of the utilitarian variety, with firearms like AR15s, G3 clones, AKs, and the like, you might go for a functional aesthetic. Gun rack options include wall-mounted steel variations and A-frame types typically found in police and military armories. Gun racks are also preferable when construction limitations forbid mounting a gun wall.
Gun Safes
Your gun room may be a vault in and of itself, but there’s nothing wrong with incorporating a gun safe into a home armory. Maybe you have existing safes you can include. Maybe you have a large safe, and will build the gun room around it. Or maybe you want an extra layer of security for truly high-value (or very restricted) firearms such as automatic weapons, historical collectibles, or one-of-a-kinds. Regardless, figure out which gun safe or residential security container is your best option.
In your research, you’ll find that some containers calling themselves “gun safes” really aren’t the most secure products on the market. They’re basically lockboxes with stouter walls and an enhanced locking mechanism. The idea is to prevent casual access to your firearms, and delay opportunistic thieves. For the most part, these “bedside” gun safes are fine for a home defense gun, but a gun room requires a bit more protection.
On the other end of the spectrum are “true safes,” like the kind found in a financial institution or a jewelry store. They literally weigh tons and have a dollar figure to match. A true safe will have a “TL Rating”. The term “TL” stands for Tool Latency, followed by a number. The rating is issued by Underwriters Laboratories, and the test involves their engineers (basically professional thieves on the side of the good guys) using various methods to gain entry into the safe. So if a safe is rated at “TL-15”, it means the engineers took 15 minutes to force their way into the safe. TL ratings usually go up to 30 minutes.
Another ratings system is called TXTL, which stands for Torch, eXplosives, Tool Latency. Safes with this rating require actual explosives to breach. You are operating in a rarefied level of gun room design with TXTL-rated safes.
Another concern of a safe or vault door is the locking system. Electronic locks can be robust and convenient, but fail easier than mechanical locks. One short and the lock is toast, and professional measures must be taken to gain entry. Additionally, some locks have a “backdoor” function where the lock itself displays a code, conveyed to the manufacturer, who then provides you a second code to bypass the main code. Used to help verified owners gain entry if they forget their combination, the function has sometimes been compromised by hackers and other bad actors.
So the best choice for your gun room or your gun safes should be a traditional mechanical lock. With no real backdoor functions or electronic components that can fail, a mechanical lock is the most robust solution for your security needs.
Combining Storage Solutions
The best defense for a gun room is a defense in depth, or layers. The room should feature layers of security like stout walls, a vault door, and a system of surveillance and alert. Additionally, it’s good practice to secure your firearms using a safe, lockable display solution, or gun cabinet within your gun room, if only for organizational purposes.
Ultimately, your specific use cases and design choices will dictate which methods you use, and in what combination. But “defense in depth” is a good strategy for every gun room.
Accessories for Your Gun Room
Give some thought to the accessories that can turn your gun room from the mundane into the extraordinary. You’ll be spending a lot of time there, so make it ideal.
- Lighting - Invest in some dedicated work lights for the benches and tables where you’ll service your firearms. Being able to see in depth into your guns is invaluable, especially when checking for wear and corrosion. Don’t skip on the ambient lighting, either. After a long day at the range and more time cleaning, you’ll want to sit back and relax. Stark work lights will be too harsh for that.
- Dehumidifiers - The real enemy of firearms (other than politicians) is humidity, which accelerates corrosion on your guns and ammunition. Invest in some dehumidifiers and the like to maintain a cool and dry environment. Ammunition can especially be sensitive to humidity, with imported steel-case ammo of questionable quality a common victim. You don’t want to score that crate of Romanian M67 for your AK, only to find out later that part of it went bad due to humidity.
Other accessories to consider are ammunition storage, firearm magazine storage, and ancillary gear like a utility sink where you can maintain your cleaning equipment.
Final Thoughts
A gun room is a combination of safe storage, workshop, “panic room,” and Second Amendment temple. Complemented by your aesthetic sense and creativity, it’s the ultimate symbol of patriotism, pride, and self-reliance.
A small note: Designing and building a gun room is a major undertaking involving construction, utilities, and demolition. In the broadest sense, it’s a renovation, so check the legalities and permit processes of your city or town before undertaking this adventure.
Looking for ammo and tactical gear to upgrade your home armory? Pro Armory has you covered. As a veteran-operated company, we know the importance of taking care of your firearms and using them wisely. We offer great gear at affordable prices — so you can get everything you need to care for and upgrade your collection. Browse our hot deals today.
Interested in firearms training? Pro Armory offers online courses from veterans and professional shooters to help you improve your skills with your firearms. Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when training officially launches.
Best Ammo Deals, Training, & Accessories
Subscribe to ProArmory sales and deals email.