Trust(s)?

Of course, Emily. I assume that you are asking in the firearm ownership sense, right?

OK! Well, then. Let’s get started. But remember, I am retired now. This is not legal advice! (Required disclaimer – go pay for this stuff elsewhere, if you are really interested.)

A trust is one way to own property, real or personal. A trust is not an entity; it is a vehicle. In other words, it is not like a corporation or an LLC. It is a way to hold title.
Basic knowledge, first. The person who starts the trust is the Settlor or Grantor. The person who administers the trust is the Trustee. The Settlor/Grantor is usually the original Trustee. The intended recipients of the eventual benefits of the Trust are Beneficiaries. The corpus of the Trust is what is put into it.

The intent of every trust is to transform personal ownership of the corpus into ownership by the trust as administered by the Trustee according to the terms of the Trust. The Trustee has fiduciary responsibilities to administer the Trust for the Beneficiaries.

A trust can be revocable by the Settlor/Grantor (until he/she passes, at which point it becomes irrevocable), or, it can be created as irrevocable.

So, why put things in a trust? There are lots of reasons, but a very simple and direct reason is to take the things out of a person’s prospective estate before they pass, and deal with the things before probate of the estate. This is the motivation behind a simple trust (which may include firearms). If I put personal possessions into a trust, when I pass, the possessions are not subject to my will, to intestacy if I don’t have a will, nor to examination by a Probate Court in dealing with, evaluating or distributing my estate. Those possessions come under the purview of my successor Trustee, or are distributed to my Beneficiaries. The privacy aspect is importance; if you had a huge gun collection, the fact that you died would not subject that collection to public disclosure via Probate Court proceedings.

So, from an estate planning perspective, if I want my collection to pass to a specific person, without it having to go through the Executor of my will and any required court involvement, I can make that person the Beneficiary of my trust. When I pass, the successor Trustee can be directed to turn that collection over to my Beneficiary.

Nope. They are a specialized kind of trust to deal with specific kinds of items. They operate exactly the same as all trusts, but account for certain legal requirements (unconstitutional, in my opinion) pertaining to the National Firearms Act of 1934. We’ll look at that tomorrow.