Okay so a \u201ctrust\u201d is a legal structure that can own property and use it for defined purposes, kinda like a corporation. They\u2019re 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\u2019s no inheritance tax. That\u2019s what it means to have a \u201ctrust fund\u201d.
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\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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, \u201cTitle II weapons\u201d require a $200 tax (value unchanged since 1934) each time it changes ownership.
Now if you\u2019ve 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 \u2013 if you named your family or your hunting buddies as beneficiaries, they\u2019d 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\u2019t really have a site of residence and didn\u2019t. 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 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 \u201ccompact\u201d and \u201csub-compact\u201d 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\u2019re legally required in more restrictive regimes in Europe, to mute the explosions you\u2019re making next to your ear), the mainstream manufacturers make short \u201cAny Other Weapon\u201d not-technically-a-shotguns, short-barreled rifles inspired the \u201cAR pistol\u201d, 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
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