I went the individual route with my FA's. Heck, at that time, hardly anyone had even heard of trusts being used for this purpose. I was lucky in that my CLEO would sign. Some would not, and that led to people seeking alternatives, such as judges and DA's, that would sign. Then trusts came along as a means of circumventing the CLEO signature requirement. I'm OK with that.
But recently, the idea of trusts has been oversold, often by lawyers seeking to make an easy buck. One of the purported benefits is passing the guns on to your heirs without an additional transfer approval or tax. But a tax-free transfer to your beneficiary can be done via a Form 5 anyway. A trust is not a substitute for a properly-drawn will.
Another supposed benefit of a trust is that your spouse, children, etc. can have access to the guns in your absence. Do you really want them shooting your FA guns without you being there? As for merely having the guns in the home with the owner away, I've never heard of the ATF making an issue of that. And with the prevalence of divorce these days, having a divorcing spouse as co-trustee on your (very expensive) automatic weapons could really be messy.
If these proposed regulations do away with the CLEO requirement, that should eliminate 95% of the legitimate reasons for having trusts. Not having trustees submit photographs and fingerprints doesn't seem to me to be a legitimate reason for the trusts. It's something that's just begging to be abused, or at least to have the appearance of abuse. Let's keep this thing simple and clean. The last thing we want is further restrictive legislation.
