Best Pistol Safes: Bedside, Biometric and No-Battery Picks, and How They’ve Failed

A pistol safe has one job: open for you and for nobody else, least of all a child. Here’s how to choose one by where it’ll live, with makers’ published specs, California’s roster checked model by model, and the public record of how small gun safes have failed.

Which pistol safe? The short answer

The best pistol safe for a home is one that’s bolted down, opens for you and refuses everyone else every time, and has a lock you’ve tested yourself after setting it up. Choose by where it will sit, then check five things on the maker’s spec sheet: the lock and its backup, the steel gauge (a lower number means thicker steel), the mounting holes, the power supply, and whether the exact model is on California’s Roster of Firearm Safety Devices.¹ Last, search the brand on the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall list.

This page is about storage and keeping guns away from children and thieves. It isn’t a review of any gun, and we haven’t handled or tested any of these safes; how we research modern safes explains why. Every figure below comes from the maker’s own page, a regulator or a published record, and where a maker doesn’t publish something, the table says so.

Pistol safes by use: the spec table

We chose brands that publish their specs, rather than the unbranded boxes that fill marketplace search results. All figures were checked on the makers’ sites and on the California Department of Justice roster on 2 November 2026; prices are the makers’ own and change often.² It isn’t a ranking. Within each use, the order means nothing.

Two things jump out. Half of the safes in the table have no published steel gauge at all, and that’s the simplest number for judging how much metal stands between a screwdriver and the contents. And a roster listing doesn’t always map neatly onto the product you can buy: model codes on the shelf and on the state’s list don’t always match, so check the code on the box against the roster before you rely on it.

Bedside and nightstand pistol safes

Both bedside picks are drawers that sit flat and slide open, and both run on mains power with batteries as a backup. Vaultek’s DS2i opens by fingerprint, keypad or app and comes with a steel cable, but its hard-mounting plates cost extra. Hornady’s Night Guard uses a radio tag you hold to the glass front, with a code and a mechanical key as backups, and comes with pre-drilled holes as well as a cable.³⁴ Hornady doesn’t give a steel gauge for the Night Guard, so we can’t compare the two on thickness.

Biometric drawer and top-opening safes

The classic fingerprint pistol safe is a low box with a lid on a gas strut. SentrySafe’s QAP1BLX has a fingerprint reader, a silent keypad and an override key, with bolt-down hardware in the box; RPNB’s RP2004 has the same three ways in, two anchor bolts and room for four pistols in a foam rack.⁵⁶ This is the category with the longest recall list, which is why the section on failures below matters most to anyone shopping here.

Hidden and wall-mounted pistol safes

Slim vertical safes mount under a desk or nightstand, or sit on a bookshelf, and slide out on rails. Vaultek’s Slider uses a mounting plate drilled for the VESA patterns found on monitor and TV brackets; RPNB’s RP2007 hangs on a bracket that fits either side and keeps its batteries in an outside compartment, so you can change them without opening the safe.⁷⁸ Hidden only works if the bracket is fixed to something solid. A slider screwed into the side of a flat-pack bedside table is only as secure as the table.

Mechanical pistol safes with no batteries

Fort Knox’s Original Pistol Box is the heavyweight here: a 10-gauge body, a 3/16 inch plate door, 22 lb, and a Simplex push-button lock that needs no batteries, made in the USA.⁹ Liberty’s HDV-90 is the other end of the scale, a 16-gauge key-only box at $59.99.¹⁰ With a key-only safe the key is the lock, so where you keep it decides who can open it.

Safes for several pistols

Vaultek’s MX holds up to eight handguns behind a 12-gauge door and weighs 32 lb; there’s a keypad-only version for anyone who’d rather not use a fingerprint lock. Liberty’s HDV-350X weighs 40 lb and adds Bluetooth to fingerprint, code and key.¹¹¹² Neither carries an independent burglary rating of the kind explained in our guide to safe burglary ratings, and none of the ten in our table claims one.

How small gun safes have failed: the public record

No competitor page we found covers this, and it’s the most useful thing we can offer: what has actually gone wrong with pistol safes and lock boxes, according to the people who investigated. Everything here comes from US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recall notices and warnings, the California Department of Justice’s own recall bulletins, and one published security study. We’ve kept to what failed, which models and what the fix was. We don’t describe how to open anyone’s safe.

• 2004 Stack-On Strong Box keypad safes, 1,320 units, could be opened without the combination. Refund.¹³
• 2005 Inprint safe-boxes for handguns, 500 units: the door might not latch when closed. Free repair.¹⁴
• 2013 Lockdown handgun vaults with three-digit combination locks, about 3,900 in the US: the lock could fail. Refund.¹⁵
• 2014 The GunBox (RFID and fingerprint), about 1,000 units: the lock could open if the box was dropped. Replacement locking mechanism.¹⁶
• 2016 Rhino Metals Bighorn P-20, about 400 units: could be opened without the combination. Refund.¹⁷
• 2017 Vaultek VT20i: researchers showed the Bluetooth link could be used to open it without the PIN. Firmware update, free upgrade service.¹⁸¹⁹
• 2018 Union Safe Company and Bunker Hill Security handgun safes sold by Harbor Freight, about 25,000 units: could open on impact. Refund.²⁰
• 2023 Fortress, Cabela’s, Gettysburg and Legend biometric safes, about 61,000 units: open to unpaired fingerprints. Replacement safe.²¹
• 2024 Awesafe, BBRKIN, Machir, Bulldog and Sanctuary / Sports Afield biometric safes, about 254,000 units together; CPSC warning on Owsoo and Cacagoo.^222324252627
• 2025 to 2026 CPSC warning on 183,000 Stack-On biometric safes, no recall agreed; BBRKIN and MouTec QHXP029B recalled, about 9,100 units.²⁸²⁹

Bigger gun safes have their own entries, such as the Stack-On Sentinel in 2019 and Redfield’s 12- and 18-gun safes in 2024, where bolts and locking plates could fail.³⁰³¹ They’re outside the scope of this page, but the pattern is the same: the lock or latch let go when it shouldn’t have.

The biometric recalls, 2023 to 2026

The first came in October 2023. Fortress Safe, an Illinois importer, recalled about 61,000 biometric safes sold under the Fortress, Cabela’s, Gettysburg and Legend Range & Field names, after 39 reports of the safes being opened with unpaired fingerprints. The CPSC also noted a lawsuit alleging that a 12-year-old boy died from a firearm taken from one of them.²¹ California’s Department of Justice explained the fault plainly: owners “can believe they have properly programmed the biometric feature when in fact” the safe “remains in the default open mode”.³² Bulldog later said its recalled pistol vaults were shipped in “demo mode”, in which any fingerprint opens the vault until the owner programmes it.³⁴

In February 2024 four more firms recalled about 120,000 safes between them: Awesafe (about 60,000, with 71 reports of unauthorised opening), Bulldog (about 33,500), Machir (about 24,820) and BBRKIN (about 2,200, one of them opened by a 6-year-old boy, with no injury reported).^22252423 June 2024 brought the largest single recall: about 133,370 Sanctuary safes, sold at Costco among other shops for $75 to $100, and Sports Afield 4-gun safes, after 77 reports of unauthorised opening. The maker told California that at least three of those reports involved children.²⁶³⁵ A further BBRKIN and MouTec model followed in July 2026.²⁹ By our count of the CPSC database, that’s about 324,000 biometric gun safes recalled in under three years.³⁶

Two cases ended without a recall. In August 2024 the CPSC warned about roughly 7,600 Owsoo and Cacagoo safes because the sellers, based in China, hadn’t answered its requests for one.²⁷ In January 2025 it warned owners of about 183,000 Stack-On biometric gun safes, pistol vaults and lock boxes, sold since 2015, that “the biometric programming feature can fail without consumers realizing”. It reported three incidents, including a 5-year-old in Michigan who used the fingerprint reader to take a gun from one and needed surgery after shooting himself, and said Stack-On Products Co. “has refused to agree to an acceptable recall”.²⁸

What the fix was

For the biometric recalls the advice was the same every time: stop using the fingerprint reader, take out the batteries and use only the key until the remedy arrives. The remedies varied. Fortress, Awesafe and Machir offered replacement safes; Bulldog and BBRKIN repair kits or replacements; SA Consumer Products and the 2026 BBRKIN recall a free repair kit.^212224252629 For the Stack-On safes, with no recall, the CPSC told owners to remove the batteries, disable the reader for good and use the keys.²⁸ The older mechanical failures mostly ended in refunds.¹³¹⁷²⁰

The Vaultek case was a security study, not a recall. Two Six Labs reported in December 2017 that the VT20i would open over Bluetooth without checking the PIN, and that the app’s traffic wasn’t encrypted, though Vaultek’s marketing said it was.¹⁸¹⁹³³ The researchers had told Vaultek in October; the company said it was working on new firmware and then offered a free upgrade service to existing owners, and the researchers noted that Bluetooth could be switched off from the keypad in the meantime.¹⁸ Its current VT Series page still describes that on-off hotkey.³⁷

Biometric, keypad, RFID or mechanical: lock types compared

Every lock type in a pistol safe trades speed for something. Here’s what the makers publish about each, set against what the recall record shows. We couldn’t find a maker in our table that publishes a false-rejection rate for its fingerprint reader; Vaultek gives the sensor’s resolution, 508 dpi, which isn’t the same thing.³ Our history of lock mechanisms in safes traces where the key and combination ideas came from.

For a household with children, the lesson from the records isn’t that fingerprint locks are bad. It’s that a fingerprint lock is only as good as its setup, and that you can’t see a setup fault by looking at the safe. A mechanical lock fails differently: it won’t let anyone in who doesn’t know the code, but anyone who’s watched you press it might. Batteries are the other trade-off. Fort Knox’s pitch for its push-button box is simply “No batteries”, and that’s a real advantage for a safe you may not open for months.⁹

Standards and the law, briefly

There’s no single US test that every pistol safe must pass. The nearest thing is California’s. Since 1 January 2002, no firearm may be sold, transferred or manufactured in California unless it comes with a firearm safety device approved by the state Department of Justice, and the approved devices, lock boxes and safes among them, are listed on its Roster of Firearm Safety Devices.¹ To get on the roster, a lock box is tested by a certified laboratory with a small handgun inside: timed attempts on the lock with ordinary tools, and a drop of about a metre onto concrete, once with the lock facing up and once facing down.³⁸

That’s a useful floor, not a seal of approval. The roster page itself carries notices about recalls of devices on its list: seven Fortress-group models (listed under the manufacturer “Safewell Group Holdings”), three Bulldog pistol vaults and two Sports Afield safes.³²³⁴³⁵ Several of the Stack-On models in the CPSC’s 2025 warning were still on the roster when we searched it.²²⁸

• Federal law: a licensed dealer, importer or manufacturer may not hand over a handgun unless the buyer is provided with a “secure gun storage or safety device”, which can be a safe, gun safe, gun case or lock box.³⁹
• State child access prevention (CAP) laws: they vary a lot. RAND counts 35 states and the District of Columbia with CAP laws as of 1 January 2025: 26 states and DC have negligent storage laws, and nine more act only where an adult intentionally, knowingly or recklessly gives a child access. Penalties and the age that counts as a minor differ from state to state.⁴⁰
• Your state: read your own state’s statute on its legislature’s website, or ask a lawyer. This page isn’t legal advice.

Bolting a pistol safe down

A pistol safe is small by design, which is exactly what makes it easy to steal whole. Look at the published weights: Liberty’s HDV-90 is 5.1 lb, Vaultek’s DS2i 9.6 lb, SentrySafe’s QAP1BLX 11.9 lb, RPNB’s RP2004 15.4 lb, Hornady’s Night Guard 18 lb and Fort Knox’s Original Pistol Box 22 lb.^1035649 Any of them can leave the house under one arm and be opened somewhere quiet later.

• Bolts first. Use the maker’s holes and hardware: Fort Knox drills four 3/8 inch anchor holes, SentrySafe and RPNB include bolt-down hardware, and Vaultek’s MX has pre-drilled holes.⁹⁵⁶¹¹
• A cable is a fallback. Hornady’s cable is rated to 1,500 lb, and Vaultek’s DS2i ships with a cable; its hard-mounting plates are sold separately.⁴³
• Fix it to something that stays. A floor, a wall stud or a solid piece of furniture. A safe bolted to a light bedside table turns the table into the handle.

How we got here: home safes, wall safes and borrowed names

The small safe for the house is older than the pistol safe by a long way. In September 1902 Meilink of Toledo was selling its “Home Deposit Vault” by post in The Saturday Evening Post for $8, with the pitch that a safe at home cost less than a deposit box at the bank; you can see the 1902 Meilink advert in our collection.⁴¹ In 1910 Charles Meilink and William Reynolds patented a wall safe built to sit inside the wall, the hidden safe’s great-grandparent.⁴² The firm that became SentrySafe began in Rochester with a cheap safe made of stamped parts, and its first big order was for 2,200 wall safes for Vassar College.⁴³

What’s changed most is who stands behind the name on the lid. SentrySafe has belonged to Master Lock since 2014, which is why California lists the QAP1BLX under Master Lock.⁴⁴² The recalled Fortress, Cabela’s and Legend safes all appear on the roster under one manufacturer, Safewell Group Holdings.³² Cannon, Stack-On and GunVault went through Chapter 11 together in 2020 as the Alpha Guardian group, and Cannon and Stack-On now describe themselves as brands of Cannon Security Products.⁴⁵⁴⁶ Our guide to who makes safes, and who owns the brands follows those threads further.

Frequently asked questions