As part of my security training I’ve been taught to avoid information leakage, letting a potential thief from fingerprinting your system with the information needed for a successful burglary. As an example any safe can be cracked with the right tools, blueprints, knowledge of your movements, etcetera. A thread on another board where a guy had an AK hanging from his wall when the police came to his door got me thinking how long would it take a casual visitor to your home, say the cable guy, from discovering you’re a “gun enthusiast”.

1. Less than ten seconds. There’s a rifle hanging from my wall, the gun safe is sitting under my television, gun magazines are on the coffee table which is littered with loose ammo, and there’s an NRA sticker on my truck and my front windows of my trailer home.

2. A few minutes. My safe is in a back room, I watch what evidence is left in view, I’m careful who I let into my home and sanitize it before hand but looking around one could discover my “hobby”.

3. About ten minutes. My safe is hidden (or I don’t have one), there isn’t anything lying around the house at all, I go out of the way to avoid being seen taking weapons to the car, I use lighting timers to make the house look occupied, etc.

4. Never. A gun is the house is 42 times more likely to kill someone in the house than fly south for the winter, I live in a “gun free zone” in federal housing, and Al Gore says they’re scary.

I picked less than 10 seconds because of the gun literature around the house.