NFA Gun Trust Lawyer Blog
A Gun Trust should be designed to hold all firearms including those restricted by the NFA including your AR-15s. All of our Gun Trusts are designed for all of your firearms. As an owner of many types of guns, I designed this trust to deal with issues from a revolver, to a Glock pistol, AR-15s, and even NFA firearms like silencers and machine guns.
Most people do not realize that many of the same issues regarding transfer upon death or incapacity exist for regular firearms and NFA firearms sold by Class 3 SOT dealers. This is why I would suggest putting all of your Guns in one of our Gun Trusts.
Recently, there has been much discussion regarding the banning of AR-15 style firearms. If your firearms are in a trust, the trust can later be amended to be a multi-generational trust which can insulate the firearms from future transfers. Our multi generational Gun Trust provides asset protection at each generation and prevents transfers. The beneficiaries do not receive the firearms by transfer upon your death but become the next managers of the trust. The Professional Gun Trust remains the owner generation after generation.
If a NFA Trust was not designed this way, we can help you amend your trust to deal with regular firearms.
Another reason to have your gun trust or NFA Trust hold all your firearms is that while we can pick beneficiaries, while we are alive, we do not know who will survive us or anything about them on the date of our death.
We do not know where they will live; in some states regular firearms are highly restricted or prohibited by law. Will some or all of our guns will be permitted in the state where each beneficiary will live when we die?
The legal status of our beneficiaries. Have our kids or friends done something silly that we do not know about that might have caused the beneficiaries to lose their rights to own, possess, or use a gun. Are they involved with drugs in a state where it is legal? While legal in some states, it is still a federal crime and would make a person using illegal drugs (at the federal or state level) a prohibited person. Another issue might involve being charged with an act of domestic violence or child abuse even if not ultimately convicted of the charge. The Lautenberg amendment is a federal statute that says that certain actions by you or your attorney on your behalf associated with charges classified as domestic violence or child abuse can cause a permanent loss of your firearms rights.
Equally as important, as much as we would like to believe that our beneficiaries will be the right age and have the right mental state when we die, we will not be there to decide. Our Gun Trusts take these issues into consideration and permits the successor Trustee to look at the age, make sure they are old enough, and in the right frame of mind. Other trusts only require that someone is not determined to be legally incompetent. With firearms this is not enough, someone can be legally sane, but not the person you would want to hand a gun. People change over time, and it is not always for the better.
Our Gun Trust allows these issues to be considered and then a decision can be made, or the decision can be to wait an addition period of time and reevaluate the beneficiary or future manager.