Estate Planning for Gun Owners
An excerpt from the beginning of the article is below:
When an estate includes firearms, the executor must be careful to avoid violating federal, state, and local firearms laws. These laws strictly regulate possession of certain weapons, govern the transfer of permissible weapons, and bar certain persons from possessing any firearms. Failure to comply with these laws may result in criminal liability, including stiff punishments and fines, and forfeiture of any weapons involved. Careful estate planning can help ensure compliance with some of these laws.
An understanding of the basic regulatory scheme is helpful. Federal firearms laws distinguish among weapons, and there are two kinds of firearms under federal law: Title I firearms and Title II firearms. Title I of the 1968 Gun Control Act includes, but is not limited to, rifles, shotguns, and handguns. The transfer of Title I firearms is generally regulated by state law.
Title II of the 1968 Gun Control Act reenacted the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA). Title II weapons are also referred to as Class 3 firearms or NFA weapons and include machine guns, silencers, short or short-barreled shotguns, short or short-barreled rifles, destructive devices (i.e., grenades or bombs), and “any other weapon.” The NFA branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) administers the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record.
For another article on the same topic, see Gerry W. Beyer & Jessica B. Jackson, What Estate Planners Need to Know About Firearms, Estate Planning Developments for Texas Professionals (April 2010). The abstract of this article reads:
Estate planning professionals must familiarize themselves with national and state gun laws and use approved estate planning techniques to represent clients effectively who own or are interested in owning firearms. Failure to comply with national and state laws can lead to fines of up to $250,000 and 10 years in prison. This article aims to educate estate planning professionals on how to protect their client’s ownership, transfer, and possession rights of National Firearms Act (NFA) weapons, while alive, when incompetent, and at death. In addition, this article addresses how to protect a client’s family members and friends from illegally possessing or transferring NFA classified weapons during and after the owner’s lifetime.