Okay so a “trust” is a legal structure that can own property and use it for defined purposes, kinda like a corporation. They’re mostly used for rich-people estate planning, the basic idea is you put your assets in a trust and name your heirs as beneficiaries, and the trust never dies so there’s no inheritance tax. That’s what it means to have a “trust fund”.

Then you can stack all sorts of tax strategies on top of that, you can get to the point where every member of your family is, legally speaking, totally impoverished even as they have full use of a billion dollar fortune (that they don’t even take money from but borrow against, so no income tax and as far as the courts are concerned they die in debt)

Trusts basically recreate dynastic feudalism within bourgeois law, and historically they were pretty restricted to keep them from subsuming the rest of the law and economy but they’ve been pretty unburdened in America since the 70s so we have that to look forward to in the 21st century.

ANYWAY, just like with marijuana prohibition, federal firearms regulations were formatted as a tax in order to pass constitutional muster at the time and part of it is that the good stuff, “Title II weapons” require a $200 tax (value unchanged since 1934) each time it changes ownership.

Now if you’ve got a collection, that could be a pretty big effective inheritance tax when you die and your heirs take possession, so originally people started using trusts the usual way, for estate planning.

Then at some point people realized that there were other aspects of firearms regulations that triggered off the identity of the owner that a trust got around – if you named your family or your hunting buddies as beneficiaries, they’d all get to use anything held in the trust instead of having to go through the whole transfer process and tax to lend it out. Individuals had to get permission from their local police head to get the good stuff, but trusts don’t really have a site of residence and didn’t. Only the trustee needed to give the government his information and fingerprints, the rest of the beneficiaries were black boxes as far as The Man was concerned. That last bit they finally walked back, but I think maybe you can still add people to a trust after the paperwork on any given piece goes through without sending their information in?

Anyway, ask a lawyer. It’s a nice little sideline for rural lawyers (who usually spend a lot of their time on trust work for estate planning already), and a boon for gun makers – most potential gun purchasers already own guns, so manufacturers always have to offer something new to stay in business (thus all the CoD-ass tacticool accessories and guns with Picatinny rails to mount them on, thus the bullpups and weird wildcat chamberings, thus concealed carry and the “compact” and “sub-compact” classes, thus the colorful guns (well the hot pink thing was also part of an attempt to expand the market with women, just like all the easily-cockable, recoil-absorbing pistols are for at the feeble elderly).

So by lowering barriers, gun trusts made Title II weapons a lot more accessible to the public, and then the gun fandom getting comfortable and used to them opened up whole new product categories - suppressors are the big new thing (they’re legally required in more restrictive regimes in Europe, to mute the explosions you’re making next to your ear), the mainstream manufacturers make short “Any Other Weapon” not-technically-a-shotguns, short-barreled rifles inspired the “AR pistol”, carbines that legally speaking are unrestricted handguns, though you notice the ads always show people *carrying* them and not using, because no one actually uses the not-a-stock-we-swear as anything but a stock