I've been spending a lot of time doing similar research. I don't see any magical deals out there, surprise surprise. You really get what you pay for. You can get the school locker style gun cabinet cheap, but of course even your kids can break into that one. You can pay a teensy bit more for something like a stack on, but of course any thief can get into one of these.
I'm probably going to start with something cheap. I don't see the point in buying a $1500 safe today, when its going to be a couple years before my guns, collectively, are worth more then the safe (counting shipping, etc.). I figure that for now I will add a rider to my homeowners insurance to cover what I have, as necessary.
A couple things to consider. What does your homeowners policy cover? Mine automatically gives me a $1000 for guns, and I can get riders to cover higher value guns as necessary.
How much are the guns worth, how much would it cost to insure them, and how much of your time would it take to get the replacement guns the way you want them, and how much is that time of yours worth?
Where do you live? I live in a 'burb. My neighbors are pretty close, sigh. They more or less know when we are gone, and if they heard drilling noises from my basement its likely they would call the cops. The thief knows this, and it limits how much time he has to bother any safe I have. If you live in the country, you can't count on that, and that may play into how secure of a safe you want. Of course, once you get past the stack on level a thief needs tools to get into any decent safe. He just needs a heck of a lot more serious tools to get into a better safe.
Do you have other things you want to store? This is especially related to the fire protection thing, though one possible solution for fire protection is to get some fire protection for the safe, but get a big enough safe that you can put a small "media safe" inside it on the bottom. These things provide more fire protection then any but the most expensive of the gun safes seem to, and the double protection should save your stuff from any fire. They are pretty cheap, relatively speaking, as they are small.
To get a good sense of what is out there I would go to this site:
http://www.agenglish.com/ I called them and had them send their catalogs to me (tried e-mail first, but it bounced back to me, that may be fixed by now). Good luck,
patent
