Get Organized: Storing Your Gun Gear

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If you can’t find it, you might as well not even have it. Here we look at how to organize your gun gear.

How many of you have heard of Marie Kondo? Don’t be bashful; it won’t create deductions on your man-card to admit it. She is an organizing genius who can make life easier. Unfortunately, it also makes your living environment simpler. Her idea of an ideal environment is pretty much bare walls and two to three of each item you need, all tucked in drawers out of sight. Getting her “spark of joy” doesn’t always mesh well with our “lots of firearms and ammunition” acquisition lifestyle. But being organized does.

When I started this life of living with firearms, the mavens suggested organization with cans, glass jars and cigar boxes. Looking back, that was my first encounter with “life wasn’t so good in the ‘good old days’ epiphany.” Basically, they sucked. So, what to do? How can you be better organized with the Marie Kondo “throw it out” approach? Here’s a few tips.

Get a Label Maker

I have one on hand that has served me well now for more than a couple of decades. It is an ancient Brother P-Touch label maker. It is so old it takes six AA batteries to run. It has no Bluetooth, or WiFi capabilities. There’s no USB port. All it does is print what I type, which is just fine by me. I use it to label storage boxes, loose-leaf binders and the boxes various firearms arrive in. Why? Because it is neater than handwritten labels, and I can color-code them.

A quick jump forward here. Back when I started getting real organization on my system, my two brothers had access to my ammunition supply. (Yes, we had it all worked out; they weren’t just sponging it.) I used color-coded labels to indicate what their choices were. Green stickers meant “Use what you want, let me know.” That way I could load up more, and they could replace the components. Blue was “Talk to me before you use this” because I had specialized loads that they might not find themselves happy using. And Red was “Don’t touch.” Those were either irreplaceable or saved for emergencies.

Now you may not have brothers who want ammo, but you might want to mark your ammo (or the bins they are in) with more than just “9mm” for example. OK, you have a label maker, now what?

When I was starting this organizing thing, there was a Big Lots store down the street from the gun shop. I found that the various shoebox-sized bins and others were perfect for storing my reloaded ammo. Cast bullets came in 4x4x4 cardboard boxes, but those boxes were not good for storing loaded ammo. They got tattered, they didn’t stack well, and once they got grubby, they couldn’t be cleaned. But the plastic boxes with locking lids solved all those problems.

So now each load, or brass supply, gets a label on the bin into which it goes. The label can be as simple as “9mm” or it can be more involved. For example, the bins (bigger, for the most part) of 9mm brass that is range pickups and my own brass saved after a range trip, are simply marked “9mm.” I know what they are, one quick peek into the bin tells me what is in there, so that’s all I need. But other bins, usually smaller ones, will be marked with caliber, source and uses, such as “.32 H&R Starline new.” This reminds me that the brass in there, however bright and shiny it is, is new, from Starline, and I don’t want to be using it to load up practice ammo. It is for load testing and such. The mixed-brass 9mm is just commodity practice brass, but the Starline is special.

Oh, I have ammo can, for sure. I’ve accumulated a bunch of them over the years, and they have their own labels as to what’s in them. The oldest ones have handwritten info, using masking tape. That is, until the masking tape falls off and I have to replace them with the Brother labels. One of these years when I’m snowed-in I might just brew a pot of coffee and sit down and relabel them all. But not now.

Get Handy Plastic Drawers

The brass bins can be stacked, but there are things you don’t want to be unstacking and re-stacking bins for. I have a reference library of firearms and more come in on a regular basis. So, I need holsters and magazines for the pistols. Oh yes, each test gun arrives with a magazine or two, but let’s get real. When it comes time to spend an afternoon hammering a plate rack to test reliability, who wants to do it with the sole magazine that came in the box? So plastic drawers on shelves, labeled (there’s that label maker again), so I can keep track. I often don’t even use the magazines that came with the gun, unless I just don’t have some on hand that fit. That way the maker (or their PR agency) gets the pistol, box and contents back.

Binders

You will have to keep track of your reloading efforts. That means noting what bullets, powders, primers and cases you used to whomp up that stellar load you now use at club matches. Writing the details on the flap of the cardboard box the bullets came in only gets you so far. (I know … been there, done that, lost the box … you know the tale.) As a friend of mine in law enforcement has been known to remark, “If it wasn’t written down it didn’t happen.”

When you go to chronograph a load (and chronos are now so inexpensive that there is no excuse) write down the detail before you go: bullet weight, brand, powder, charge weight, primer, cases. Then, once you are at the range, note the firearm used, and write down all the details the chrono reports. Yes, write down the extreme spread and the standard deviation. You might not need them. Or even know what they mean. But if you want to know later, you won’t have it if you didn’t write it down.

All this info gets written up on pages that are in your loose-leaf binder, with a label on the spine. Call it whatever you want but label it.

And while we’re here, invest in some 3×5 cards. Yes, dead-tree info system stock. OK, this card goes into the bin with the ammo you’ve loaded. You’re thinking, “I load one caliber, one load, why write it down?” I thought that too. I loaded in the basement of the house where I lived. I wrote the powder charge for the three loads (one .38 Special, one .357 Magnum and one .45ACP) on the wall next to the powder measure. Then, I moved. I had forgotten, in the moving, to write that info down. I phoned the new owner, “Oh, we were just about to paint that wall.” Saved by the bell.

No, write it down. And include all the details: overall length, bullet, brand, powder, weight, primer, all of it. The card goes into the bin with the ammo. You can even note on the card what the load is for: practice, competition, hunting, whatever.

And all these bins and loose-leaf binders need shelves on which to stand. You can’t just stack them in the corner. There are only four corners in a room, and you’ll need more than that. I’ll leave style, construction and placement to you, but keep this in mind: Ammo is heavy. A thousand rounds of 9mm 125-grain FMJ weighs 21 pounds. .45 ACP weighs 33 pounds. Depending on how much you load (and if you use steel ammo cans), a shelf might be required to hold 150 pounds of dead weight. Keep that in mind when considering shelves at the big-box hardware store, or the discount furniture store.

OK, so far we’ve covered ammunition and the accessories. What about the firearms themselves?

No, I’m not suggesting slapping a label on each one—not that any label would survive the rigors of use and cleaning. No, this is a longer-term perspective. The simple questions are: What is it, and where does it go?

When I was working at various gun shops, we’d get the occasional very sad visit. The widow, or the children of a deceased gun owner (back then often a World War II vet) and what was left. “Oh, his golf partner said Charlie always wanted him to have the [fill in the name of an expensive rifle or shotgun] after he died.” Or the “helpful” gun club members who were happy to buy a firearm for more than “the $100 he said he paid for it.”

What is it? Write it down. What is it worth? Look it up and write it down. Who do you want to get it once you’re gone? Need I say it? Write it down. Putting it all in a will is good, but cumbersome, and if you are in the habit of wheeling and dealing, trading and buying/selling, it’s expensive to update. But if you have a loose-leaf binder with this info, then that is the guideline your executor can go by. Oh, it doesn’t have the legal force of a notarized will detailing things, but it does give your widow (or widower, let’s not be sexist about this, eh?) info they otherwise would not have.

And in this day and age of digital photography and inexpensive printers, you can easily take a few shots of important details like serial numbers and include the printout in the loose-leaf binder. Or manila folders. Or envelopes. Just get it written down.

Getting back to the start, the Marie Kondo method would likely have you pare things down to one firearm in each category you use, collect or compete with. That would, for most of us, be very boring and certainly would not create the “spark of joy” she wishes for us all. Sometimes we (well some of us, anyway) like being in a sparse space but trying to live there all the time means giving up the amenities we’ve gotten accustomed to. Like shelves full of loaded ammo.

Get the spark, but don’t get crushed under the clutter.  

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the December 2025 issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.

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