For those of you who think 41P/F is so wonderful because the CLEO signoff is going away, I ask why you would buy NFA items as an individual. The benefits of buying with a trust are far greater than buying as an individual. As an individual, you need fingerprints, photos, and CLEO signoffs for each NFA item that you purchase.
With a trust, my fellow trustees can receive my NFA items when the ATF sends back the tax stamp (this is useful if I am out of state either on a deployment, vacation, etc), they can use the items, they can possess the items, and in the event of my death, there is no additional paperwork or confusion over who owns the items as they are owned by the trust.
With trusts, you can either draft your own for free or get a lawyer to draft one for you for. I had an attorney draft mine. He charged either $400 or $500... I can't remember. Before anyone says that that's a lot of money, I argue that it's petty cash considering that it was done by an attorney who specializes in gun law and when we spend $200 per NFA item on the tax alone, $500 to eliminate all the fingerprinting, photos, and CLEO signoff and to fast-track NFA purchases is a small price to pay. All I had to do was send him a list of names of people that I wanted on the trust and talk with him for about 15 minutes. With trusts, no one needs to get fingerprinted, photographed, and no CLEO signoff is needed.
For those who whine that the CLEO signoff is difficult to obtain, you could have easily gotten a professionally-drafted trust with a few minutes on the phone and a few bucks and been buying NFA items as you wished without having to get fingerprints, photos, CLEO signoffs, or make any CLEO notifications. The CLEOs in my area are all gun-friendly and I was able to literally walk in and out in 5 minutes with the CLEO signature. I know this because I purchased my first NFA item as an individual before finding out about the benefits of a trust. My point is the regardless of whether the CLEO signoff was easy or difficult to obtain, a trust is still the best way to make NFA purchases. I can literally buy an NFA item and give a copy of my trust to my Class III/SOT and wait for the tax stamp to come back.
A trust might not be appealing if you do not know the law and cannot draft a trust for yourself, if you think that paying an attorney to draft one is too costly (if you think that is too costly then you probably should reconsider getting into NFA), if you purely plan to be the only one to shoot/possess/use your NFA items, you do not care what happens to your NFA items if you die or are otherwise incapacitated, or if you just don't have any family/friends.
My point is that it is irresponsible to not have a trust if you are plunging into NFA. Those of us who make multiple NFA purchases and are serious about NFA items, typically have trusts. While I agree that having to get fingerprints and photos every 2 years is not terrible, it is definitely worse than simply giving a copy of my trust to my Class III/SOT. And besides that, you could theoretically have hundreds or thousands of trustees listed in your trust. While most trusts likely have 1-5 persons listed, there is no limit as to the number of trustees. They just have to be able to legally possess NFA items. Getting all of the trustees listed can potentially become problematic if you have a lot of people in your trust and if they live in various locations.
For those of you who wish to dispute what I said, I encourage you to talk to others who are into NFA items as well as your Class III/SOT and attorneys who specialize in gun law. You will find that trusts are not time-consuming, not expensive, and are the fastest, easiest, and make the most sense from a legal perspective.
Most who've chosen to go the trust route in the first place did so precisely to avoid the burden of pursuing the CLEO sign-off.
