Source.

Gun safe manufacturer Liberty Safe has said its customers will now be able to have the records of their safe combinations “expunged” after the company faced growing backlash for handing over the access code to one safe to the FBI.

Liberty Safe customers will be able to fill out a form to have records of their safe access codes deleted, meaning they can “take control of how their information is stored and protected,” the manufacturer said in a statement on Wednesday evening.

Earlier on Wednesday, Liberty Safe had said the FBI requested the access code to a safe on August 30, which it gave after seeing proof of a warrant. The safe belongs to 34-year-old Nathan Hughes, who has been charged with felony civil disorder and several misdemeanors relating to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Civil disorder, and misdemeanors.  A misdemeanor is like when your drive over the speed limit.  Disorder is just that.  Disorder.  Remember those charges, and remember that no trial has been conducted yet, so nothing has been proven.

“Our company’s protocol is to provide access codes to law enforcement if a warrant grants them access to a property,” Liberty Safe said on Tuesday evening. “After receiving the request, we received proof of the valid warrant, and only then did we provide them with an access code.”

In the statement posted to social media, Liberty Safe said it was committed to protecting its customers’ personal property and 2nd Amendment rights, “and has repeatedly denied requests for access codes without a warrant in the past.”

Several conservative figures criticized Liberty Safe over the move, with the founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, calling the company “an enemy to gun owners.”

In its updated statement, Liberty Safe said it understands that “many of our customers are willing to assume the responsibility of safeguarding their own combinations,” and those who opt out of the company’s “secure database” will have “limited recourse in case of a lost combination.”

Just like I said should have been the policy all along.

But it may be too little, too late.  Especially because of things like this.  You knew someone was going to look into this.

Financial contributions made to Democratic political candidates including former President Barack Obama have drawn scrutiny after an executive’s company recently complied with a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warrant.

[ … ]

In an additional X post published on Wednesday, Liberty Safe said the company “was founded on the belief that Americans should have the fundamental right to protect and safeguard their valuables and property.”

In September 2021, Liberty Safe was acquired by Monomoy Capital Partners, a private investment firm that has offices in New York and Connecticut and $2.7 billion in committed capital across five investment funds. Liberty Safe operates out of its Payson, Utah, facility.

The manufacturer’s CEO, Justin Hillenbrand, made political contributions to Obama twice when the Democrat was a first-time presidential nominee in 2008, totaling $4,600, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records.

Monomoy founding partner Stephen Presser, who died in March, is listed by the FEC as making countless individual contributions to myriad Democrats, including current Senators Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman and Mark Kelly. The company’s max donations over the last 10 election cycles have totaled almost $400,000.

“And we’re supposed to be surprised they betrayed their customers to the FBI as quickly as humanly possible?” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Boycott Liberty Safe.”

You know, those folks who talk about that whole “bitterly clinging onto God and guns” thing.

So realize what they did to him.  They conducted a red flag raid on him and took his possessions, before a trial and without just reason.  You know how we feel about red flag laws.  They are unjust, immoral and unconstitutional.  They violate due process rights.

Here is the Gestapo trash who effected the theft and firearms confiscation.

Another angle of the FBI arrest of Nathan Hughes over J6

The feds REALLY didn’t want people getting close and videoing them pic.twitter.com/l6UFDMBGT5

— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) September 7, 2023

You can make up your own mind on that.  Here is the scoop.

And here is a reddit/Firearms discussion thread.  For me it all boils down to this one thing.  Sure, the if the FedGov wants into your safe, it’s going to get into your safe.  They’ll turn it over and take a crowbar to it if they have to, or simply cut through the sides.  There is this interesting tidbit from the thread.

… as I did some research on this yesterday. SecuRam electronic locks have a recovery code. The default is “999999”. This doesn’t open the lock, but it gives you a random string to give to Liberty. They then use that to give you a recovery code that resets the safe code to the factory default.

Now, there are several important notes here:

1. The code from your safe is generated upon request and only valid for 20 minutes. So having it in a database somewhere isn’t realistically a threat.
2. You can change the recovery code. You have to go through a process that involves calling Liberty to do it, and they’ll try to talk you out of it, but you can change it.
3. When I called up they explained their security process to me: they’ll only give the recovery code to a Liberty-certified locksmith. Even you, the owner, have to have a locksmith that Liberty has certified present to do it.

But for gun safe companies, there shouldn’t be any back door code for entry into the safe, and that seems to me like a selling point for gun safes.  Something like this.  “We know that you are buying our safe to make it as difficult as possible for people to get into your safe and touch the possessions you value.  So we don’t provide a back door code for entry by anyone.  Thus, warrant or no warrant, we have nothing to say to law enforcement because that feature isn’t a part of our products.  Therefore, if you get locked out and forget your code, you should use the key we’ll send, or if you’ve lost that too, you may as well bring out the grinder or cutting torch, because we’re not getting into it for you.  We can’t.  If you’re considering out products, we know that’s what you want.”

I agree with the video from Backfire more than I do anything I’ve read or heard on this.

There is a plethora of articles, discussion threads and other resources that presume to give advice on the issue of floor loading with heavy gun safes.  Some of them even provide professional engineering counsel, even if they don’t say so.  For instance, some articles I have seen mention the typical and customary floor design loading limit of 40 pounds per square foot (PSF) and then opine something like “but even though the load for a safe is concentrated in a small space, since the total floor surface area is much larger than the surface area the safe occupies and that isn’t loaded with the same weight, the gun safe load should be just fine,” or something like that.

I won’t say much more about those articles, except that it is extremely ill-advised to follow such ridiculous counsel, and unless it was crafted by a registered professional engineer specifically for your situation, you should ignore most if not all such articles.  While I am a registered PE, what follows doesn’t constitute engineering advice for your specific situation or any specific situation for that matter (see the disclaimer below), but it might be instructive and beneficial for education to demonstrate and explain what I did to ensure my home was protected both from catastrophic failure and deleterious deflection and sagging of floor joists over time.

While some articles appear to downplay the significance of floor joist loading, I have been inside homes and seen sagging floors (that had not – or had not yet – catastrophically failed).  While I considered the so-called “heavy load path” for transporting the gun safe inside the house, perhaps the more significant issue has to do with floor loading over time.

In order to provide the necessary background to understand the plans, the gun safe weighs in at just over 600 pounds.  The measurements are 20″X33″X59″, so the floor loading significantly exceeds the design floor loading of 40 PSF.

The home is a new home built with pier and girder, with “engineered” joists.  Engineered joists can span a much longer distance that traditional joists, and have no bracing or blocking.  The joists sit either on girder (for spans) or ledger strip (at the edges).  It obviously mattered to the builder that this large piece of granite in the kitchen:

Exceeded the allowable floor loading of 40 PSF, so this girder sits underneath the large rock.

The kitchen shown above is in the Northerly direction, and the picture of the garage wall below looks East.

This is the hallway down which the safe was moved from the garage to the room on the right.  The girder also sits under the hallway about three feet from the doorway to the garage, minimizing joist span for the move.

Right behind the garage wall is a room that has a closet, this closet being the intended final resting place for the gun safe.  The floor joists are oriented East-West, and the support girders are oriented North-South.  Placing the gun safe in this closet (which is centered at the North end of the room against the hallway wall, directly to the right as you stand in the picture above), means that I will be sitting the safe cantilevered along a joist several feet from the ledger strip.  Furthermore, if I was going to position the safe facing East-West, the aspect ratio means that I could sit it along two joists (recall that the joists are 16″ on center).  But I intended to position it facing South.  Thus in my judgment I needed to construct a girder North-South, directly under the safe.  Ron Hiatt, PE, helped my draw up the plans, although the plans as implemented have slight modifications compared to what was originally conceived.

The first step was to measure and lay out the girder, including plumb lines showing where I needed to dig my footings.

This picture shows the wall separating the garage and room which will house the gun safe.  The door to the left is the door to the hallway shown above, and a right turn takes me into the room which contains the closet which has the safe.

Plumb lines showing intended location of footings.

Cut a hole in the vapor barrier and dig footings, this step being especially difficult with limited room under the house.

Each of the three footings were at least 1 cubic foot in volume.

The footings were slightly deeper than 1 foot.

These are used to anchor the 4″X4″s, placed directly into the concrete, flush with the top of the finished concrete and directly under the plumb line.

I had to use 300 pounds of concrete, which I mixed right in the holes (requiring slightly more water than the bags called for).  Use shims to ensure that the 4″X4″s are plumb, and then anchor the column with a 1″X2″ brace attached with a drywall screw to the joist above it.

Attach two ten foot 2″X6″ girder pieces to the 4″X4″s using carriage bolts, aiding with drywall screws.  I like to use screws since they can be installed cleanly (pre-drilled, avoiding cracks and splits), and use of a nail gun might have knocked the 4″X4″ out of plumb.

Use metal shims where you can, as has become commonplace with new home design between pier and girders.

Here is another picture of shimming.

In other places, use standard wood shims depending upon clearance.

The final girder looks like this, running North-South and with additional 1″X2″ bracing because I had the additional wood.

The safe in its final resting place in the closet looks like this, sitting directly on top of the new girder and against the hallway wall.

During the move, the safe at all times (a) was directly over the girder, or (b) directly over doubled-up joists (two engineered floor joists at the load bearing walls), or (c) not more than approximately three feet from the girder or doubled-up floor joists.  The total time in transit from the garage to the closet was approximately two minutes.

The total investment in components and parts represents approximately $150.  This is a small fraction of the cost of the home.  Guns and safes represent a significant investment of time, money and energy.  Don’t do them haphazardly.  Homes represent a much larger investment.  Don’t destroy either one with a safe that is too heavy for the design.  Think.  Plan.  Execute.  Hope is not a plan.

Disclaimer: This article does not constitute engineering advice.  The plans shown and discussed above are not necessarily adequate or appropriate for all or even any specific circumstances.  There is no warranty, express or implied, in the plans discussed herein.  The liability for any application or use of said plans rests solely with the user and not with the author.  In any use of said plans, or any plans based on, analogous to or any modification thereof, the user specifically indemnifies the author and understands that he is alone responsible for any and all damage.  The author doesn’t assume responsibility for any damage – catastrophic or gradual – to any structures, systems or components resulting from these plans.