It sounds like a planned robbery and the victim was known to the assailants: forcing the victim to open the safe. How did they know he had a safe, and there was something in there worth robbing?
That's why opsec is so important.
I remember a post about 10 years ago on one of the firearms collector boards.
A guy walked out his front door in the morning and was met with a gun in in his ear when he stepped out on his front porch.
Two men forced him back into his house and made him open all of his gun safes- they had a 'shopping list' of firearms they wanted him to produce, that they found linked to him from his online profile. It wasn't throwaway mosin nagants and yugo mausers they wanted, they walked away with some really high end stuff probably pushing 6-figures in value.
The victim was a prolific poster who posted a lot of detailed pics of stuff in his collection. He also had an email address in his sigline that with 15 seconds of googling, gave his home address... it was something like <firstname lastname>@<cityname>.net
