Time to get rid of your Liberty gun safes

[Double Naught Spy]

Exactly... "speed bump". Federal and State law enforcement frequently deal with locked safes in criminal investigations. Remember when Mythbusters drilled a hole in the top, filled a safe with water and blew it apart with a small "depth charge"? If the agency is in a hurry, it is not that difficult to cut through a safe or simply destroy it or its contents. At least if the safe gets opened, there is a chance you will get your stuff back intact.

We had a safe guy come and work on a safe at out business and we asked him about breaking open safes. He explained that you can get into a lot of safes fairly quickly, but the risk is to the contents. When using grinders or a torch, he was saying, it is really easy to accidentally catch stuff on fire inside if there is a lot of paperwork and such.

Years later, I was at a gem and mineral show and a safe vendor was promoting one of their safes and had one of the safe's from their competition along side of it. He then had two teams work the safes to break inside...with sledgehammers...just using brute force. The competition safe had a basketball sized hole in it in about 15 minutes. It took 45 for his crew to open up one side of his safe and then he invited the audience to try to break open a hole elsewhere in the safe. People were pounding on it all day long. At the end of the day, they had 2 more holes in it.

What was interesting to note was that both safes have a variety of items inside including a cheapo garden vase/planter made of glass. Both vases were broken as a result of the sledgehammering.

Explosives are fastest, but most apt to cause damage to things inside.

A professional safe cracker (working the lock), depending on skill and the safe, could be in the safe in a few minutes to a few hours, but zero damage to contents.

The point here is as you suggest. Depending on how well you want to be assured of the condition of the contents, how fast you want the safe open, etc. will influence what methods you use to try to open the safe.