Counseling tells people to store the firearm. We are the place it goes.
SafeReach builds the voluntary storage infrastructure that prevention programs keep referring to and rarely have: connected lockers and safes, the training that surrounds them, and the de-identified reporting that shows your funder it worked.
Temporary storage lockers — university wellness centre installation
11Organizations helped
$198,459Raised through our program
4,697Safes provided to our partners
32Areas served nationwide
The gap
Every prevention program in the country points people toward secure storage. Almost none of them can point anywhere specific.
Lethal means counseling works by putting time and distance between a person in crisis and a firearm. But the counseling ends with a recommendation, and the recommendation ends at the front door. Off-site storage is scarce, custody transfer is legally fraught, and asking a gun owner to hand their property to an institution is the fastest way to end the conversation.
SafeReach removes the transfer. The owner keeps sole access the entire time. No custody, no paperwork, no record, no report to anyone. The institution provides the infrastructure and sees only de-identified program data.
A suicidal crisis is frequently brief, and most people who survive an attempt do not go on to die by suicide — which is why access, not intent, is the variable worth changing.
What we build
Four parts of one system.
Hardware alone is a locker. What makes it prevention infrastructure is everything attached to it — the training that gets it used, the data that proves it worked, and the public resources that make it findable.
Secure storage
Lockers, safes and locks
Self-service locker banks for voluntary off-site storage, plus home safes and cable locks with prevention-focused inserts. Owner-controlled access on all three.
Education & training
Three curricula, three audiences
Locked & Loved for the public, the SAFE Pillar Series for community pillars across prevention, crisis and postvention, and Secure Storage Partner Training for host organizations.
On every screen
Support is offered, never required.
A 988 footer sits on every kiosk screen. Optional, anonymous check-in surveys ask how someone is doing at intake, at each access, and at close-out. Nothing is mandatory and nothing is tied to a name.
If you or someone you know is in emotional or mental distress, call or text 988 — free, confidential, 24/7. Veterans press 1.
Data & reporting
SafeReach Connect
De-identified storage events, duration trends, locker utilization and aggregated survey responses, delivered as reports your program officer and your funder can both read.
Public resources
Built at our own cost
safestorageutah.org and timeanddistance.org were not commissioned and not paid for. We built them because the resources did not exist, and they are free to everyone.
Temporary storage lockers
A free-standing locker bank with no attendant and no counter.
76" H48" W
Standard configuration
76" H × 48" W × 21" D
10 × small locker — 8" H × 15" W × 20" D
2 × rifle locker — 55" H × 15" W × 20" D
Steel, individually secured, anchored, made in the USA
Owner-controlled access
The user sets a private credential from their own phone number and a PIN they choose. Only they can open the locker under routine circumstances. The host takes no possession, custody or control.
No custody, no paperwork
Because nothing changes hands, there is no transfer, no command notification, no law enforcement contact and no disciplinary or medical record.
Plain-language kiosk, English and Spanish
Registration asks only for legally required information. Every screen is written so the kiosk is never the hard part.
No firearm details, ever
Make, model and serial number are never collected. Ownership is not verified, so a person can also store a friend's or family member's firearm during a crisis.
Configured with you, not for you
Locker mix and sizes, reporting, siting, signage and agreement language are scoped with your organization. Prevention work is collaborative.
Voluntary temporary lock-out
A person can put time and distance between themselves and their own items.
A self-imposed waiting period, chosen by the user, during a moment when they judge it would help. Nothing about it involves staff, and nothing about it is imposed.
User-initiated
The person chooses the hold themselves. The host cannot impose one.
Automatic release
The locker reopens on its own when the timer expires. No staff involved, no request to make, nobody to explain yourself to.
Early-exit safeguard
Ending a lock-out early still triggers a mandatory one-hour wait — the minutes that matter most.
Owner retains access throughout
Consistent with the rest of the system. Nobody else gains the ability to open the locker at any point.
SafeReach Connect
Reporting your funder will accept and your privacy officer will approve.
What your team can see
Storage events and storage-duration trends over time
Locker-size utilization, which indicates what is being stored
Aggregated, anonymous survey responses on motivations and resource needs
Program reach, engagement and key performance metrics by location
What nobody can see
No firearm make, model or serial number is ever collected
No personally identifiable information is shared with the host or partners
Use generates no command notification and no law enforcement contact
Written agreements define liability boundaries among all parties
All partner-facing data is aggregated and de-identified. Information is released only where mandated by law.
Built-in surveys
Three optional, anonymous touchpoints. They tell you why people are using the system, how they are doing while they use it, and what would have helped more.
At intake — why they cameAt each access — how they are doingAt close-out — whether it helped
Education & training
A locker nobody knows about is furniture.
Our curricula have been delivered well beyond the firearm community — from home builders to victim advocates to a room of 200 business owners — by people with years of experience training large groups.
SAFE Pillar Series
Trains community pillars across all three phases: prevention, crisis and post-event — with a concrete action plan for each phase, adapted to the person's actual role.
Most gatekeeper training stops at recognizing risk and referring out. This carries through to what happens after, and gives each participant a plan they leave with.
Four-class series, or a condensed two-hour session.
Locked & Loved
Public-facing. Teaches the basics of secure storage to gun-owning households in language that respects ownership and does not lecture.
Secure Storage Partner Training
For host organizations. How to provide secure storage, how to talk about it without losing the room, and how to keep the offer standing after the grant cycle ends.
SAFE Pillar Series in the field200+ business owners, one conversation
Current work
Shipped, deployed, and in production.
Intermountain Health
10,000 cable locks customized with 988 messaging, shipped with prevention-focused inserts we developed with Intermountain. Complete and delivered.
Lockers across Utah
Locker systems placed in coordination with the Utah Public Health Association and the Utah Suicide Prevention Coalition and Committee.
Vehicle safes — in development
A vehicle safe with a companion app for securing firearms in vehicles, with reminders and responsible-ownership prompts. In development for Gun Safe Families.
4,500+ safes, distributed with partners
Across government agencies, public health organizations, health systems and prevention organizations. We have been the supply side of other people's prevention programs for years, which is how we know what actually gets used and what sits in a storeroom.
Independently evaluated
The University of Colorado Anschutz, a leading center for military and veteran suicide prevention research, serves as our independent evaluator. Hold My Guns advises us on firearm-community trust.
Legislative work
The infrastructure needs law behind it. We work on that too.
Two barriers stop storage networks from existing: nobody knows who gets sued, and the money arrives once and disappears. We support legislation on both, and we will share our drafting and testimony work with any state that wants it.
Utah · in progress
Utah Voluntary Firearm Storage Act
The legal piece. Provides clear civil immunity to organizations that host voluntary, temporary firearm storage.
Why it matters
Gun shops, clinics and veterans' organizations across Utah want to help and don't, because no one knows who gets sued if a firearm is returned and something goes wrong. Liability fear is the single biggest barrier to building a storage network.
Who it covers
Federally licensed dealers, law enforcement agencies, and — new in Utah — community hosts: behavioral health facilities, veterans service organizations, faith communities and community centers.
Precedent
Alabama, Arkansas, Ohio and Maine all passed versions in 2025, most of them unanimously. Utah would be the first to explicitly protect community hosts.
Standing principle
Entirely voluntary on both sides.
Utah · in progress
Utah Safe Storage & Suicide Prevention Fund
The funding piece. Creates a restricted account in Utah code, supported by an ongoing appropriation and used exclusively to purchase secure firearm storage equipment.
Why it matters
Lethal means counseling points people toward storage, but the storage often isn't there. Prevention programs have run on one-time grants that arrive once and disappear. The need recurs every year; the funding hasn't.
Why ongoing, not one-time
Home safes are consumable — each one distributed is gone, and next year's at-risk households need their own. Lockers require software, connectivity and replacement on a three-year cycle. One-time money buys hardware that goes dark in year four.
What it buys
At $500,000 a year: roughly 30 locker installations with servicing, or 5,000 home safes annually, prioritized by county-level need.
Funding & procurement
"We'd love to. There's no line item for it."
We hear that more than any other objection, and it is usually solvable. Most of our deployments are paid for out of funding the organization already had access to and had not connected to storage.
Where the money usually comes from
Suicide prevention and Governor's Challenge funding
Injury and violence prevention program budgets
Campus student wellness, health service and safety budgets
Health system community benefit and population health funds
Federal and state grant programs with lethal means safety objectives
Veterans service organization and community foundation grants
What we do alongside you
Identify grant opportunities that fit your organization and timeline
Provide budget figures, scope language and quotes for an application
Supply program-evaluation and reporting language that funders ask for
Structure the deployment as a purchase or a lease, whichever your funding allows
Deliver reporting after award that supports renewal
Pricing is scoped per deployment, because locker mix, siting and reporting vary. Tell us roughly what you are working with and we will get you a number you can put in a budget line.
Credibility where it counts
We compete alongside the people we are asking to listen.
Our competitive shooting team keeps us active in the firearm community. That is deliberate. Trust is the precondition for a real conversation about storage, and it is not earned from a conference room.
Sport shooting is genuinely good for people. We want the community to keep it, and we want responsible owners to know there is somewhere to go when life gets hard — without surrendering ownership, and without anyone making a record of it.
This is also why our messaging works for institutions. A program the firearm community rejects doesn't prevent anything, no matter how well funded it is.
Shoot with us
We're adding shooters to the team. If you compete, or you want to, and you care about where this conversation goes in the firearm community — get in touch. Sponsorship, match support, and a jersey that starts conversations at the range.
Neither was commissioned. Neither was paid for. Both are free to use, free to link, and free for your program to hand out.
Utah Safe Storage Map
Where a person can actually store a firearm in Utah right now — lockers, free safes, free cable locks, FFL transfer storage and law-enforcement safe harbor sites, filterable by offering and organization type.
A plain-language explanation of why secure storage saves lives, written for gun owners rather than about them, with a state-by-state path to finding storage nearby.
What prevention teams and procurement offices ask first.
How the lockers work
Does the host organization take custody of the firearm?
No. The person storing the item sets a private credential using their own phone number and a PIN they choose, and they retain exclusive access for the entire rental period. The host location takes no possession, custody, or control, and has no routine ability to open a locker.
Does using a SafeReach locker require ATF Form 4473 paperwork?
No. Because the renter retains exclusive access via PIN and the host never takes possession, ordinary rental activity does not constitute a transfer requiring ATF Form 4473. The one exception is abandonment: if a firearm is left unretrieved past the timeframes in the user agreement, a host Federal Firearms Licensee is required by federal regulation to log it into their records.
What records are created when someone rents a locker?
A rental record is created. It contains the renter's mobile phone number, a cryptographically hashed PIN that no one can read back, timestamps of when the locker was opened, the digitally signed user agreement, and, for firearm rentals only, a physical address collected so a host Federal Firearms Licensee can meet federal recordkeeping obligations if items are later abandoned. What ordinary use does not produce is a command notification, a law enforcement contact, or a disciplinary or medical record. Firearm make, model, and serial number are never collected, and host organizations receive only de-identified, aggregated data. Full detail is in our privacy policy.
Can someone store a firearm that is not theirs?
Yes. Ownership is not verified, which means a person can store a friend's or family member's firearm during a crisis. That is often the exact situation where a few days of distance matters most.
How long does installation take?
Once a site is agreed, our installation team sets the unit into place, secures and anchors it, and brings it online. The unit is ready to use in minutes.
Where is SafeReach available?
Locker systems are currently deployed in Utah, in coordination with the Utah Public Health Association and the Utah Suicide Prevention Coalition and Committee, with expansion underway. Safes and cable locks ship to partner organizations nationwide.
For prevention programs
What is lethal means safety, and where does storage fit in?
Lethal means safety, also called means restriction or means safety counseling, is the practice of putting time and distance between a person at risk and the method they would be most likely to use. It works because a suicidal crisis is frequently brief, and because method matters enormously to whether an attempt is survived. Secure storage is how the principle gets operationalized for firearms. The gap most programs run into is that counseling ends with a recommendation to store, and there is often nowhere specific to send the person. That is the gap we build for.
How does this fit a Governor's Challenge, Zero Suicide, or 988 implementation?
Most suicide prevention frameworks name lethal means safety as a core strategy, and most implementation teams can point to the training they have delivered but not to storage capacity they have created. A locker deployment turns a strategy line into countable infrastructure: a physical resource in a defined location, with usage and survey data attached. A persistent 988 footer appears on every kiosk screen, so the crisis line is present at the moment a person is already acting on their own safety.
Our clinicians already deliver lethal means counseling. How does this add anything?
Counseling changes intent to act. Storage capacity changes whether acting is possible. Programs trained in counseling on access to lethal means consistently report the same downstream problem: the conversation goes well, and then the patient has no practical option other than a friend's house or a safe they do not own. Providing a voluntary, non-punitive place to store closes that loop and gives your clinicians something concrete to offer at the end of the conversation.
Does SafeReach support gun violence prevention work as well as suicide prevention?
Yes, and the mechanism is the same in both cases: making it easier for a person to voluntarily create distance from a firearm during a period of elevated risk. The majority of firearm deaths in the United States are suicides, so the two fields overlap more than the public conversation suggests. Because our system is voluntary, requires no custody transfer, involves no registry, and never asks anyone to surrender ownership, it can be adopted by programs across that conversation, including by the firearm-owning community itself, which is the population any effective program has to reach.
Can a college or university use this in a campus prevention program?
Yes. Campus deployments work well because the locker reads as a general-purpose voluntary storage resource rather than a firearm-specific intervention, which lowers the barrier both for a student to use it and for an institution to host it. Siting, signage, and agreement language are scoped with your campus, and the right placement depends on which department owns the resource.
How do we show a funder that it worked?
Through the SafeReach Connect dashboard: storage events and duration trends, locker-size utilization, aggregated anonymous survey responses on why people came and whether it helped, and program reach and engagement by location. Optional check-in surveys run at intake, at each access, and at close-out, so you can report on outcomes rather than only on units deployed. We also supply program evaluation and reporting language that funders commonly ask for.
What does a locker deployment cost?
Pricing is scoped per deployment, because locker mix, siting, and reporting requirements vary. Deployments can be structured as a purchase or a lease depending on what your funding allows. Most of our deployments are paid for out of funding the organization already had access to and had not connected to storage, and our team will help identify grant opportunities and provide budget figures and scope language for an application.
What is the difference between a temporary storage locker and a home safe?
A home safe puts a lock between a person and a firearm inside their own home. A temporary storage locker adds distance as well, because the firearm is stored off-site at a host location for a defined rental period, which is what the research points to during an acute crisis. We provide both, since different situations call for different tools and a program serving a whole community usually needs both.
Start a conversation
Tell us what you're trying to solve.
Not a demo request and not a sales call. Tell us the population you serve and the constraint you're working under — budget, liability, campus politics, whatever it actually is — and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help.
76" H
48" W
