Legal Question: Shipping trust-owned handgun between trustees

[ChrisG]

Hi,
Does anybody have any experience shipping a handgun, owned by a revocable living trust, between trustees? Is this legal to do without going through an FFL, and will one of the major carriers allow it?

To give you a context, imagine that Joe CCW is traveling from his home in state A to state B (which honors his CCW) to work for several weeks. He will then depart directly from state B for overseas, and cannot take firearms with him. In order to have a handgun available to him in state B, he plans to carry it to state B, and then ship it to a trustee back in state A before beginning overseas movement. The trustee will then store the handgun on his behalf until his return to state A. Let's assume that the trustee is an immediate family member and not a prohibited person, so there will be no appearance of evading a background check.

I realize this is probably a pretty obscure question, but I figure someone here might have gone through this before and have some wisdom to share.
Thanks,
Chris

[JFK]

This is a great question. A quick look at NM and Federal Law I did not find anything prohibiting it, but nothing saying it is legal. I would think that if the trustee is not prohibited it would be OK. If I can add a trustee to an NFA trust and have it legal for them to possess NFA items I would assume that law would treat the trust as a person.

Where is our resident lawyer? I am curious about this.

[ChrisG]

This is a great question. A quick look at NM and Federal Law I did not find anything prohibiting it, but nothing saying it is legal. I would think that if the trustee is not prohibited it would be OK. If I can add a trustee to an NFA trust and have it legal for them to possess NFA items I would assume that law would treat the trust as a person.

Where is our resident lawyer? I am curious about this.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm on firm legal ground. I expect the hard part will be convincing UPS or FEDEX to accept that it's legal and take the shipment.

[MEH]

Whether it's legal or not I do not know. However, I think it's clear that neither UPS or FEDEX will allow by policy.

UPS

FEDEX

[TR675]

I think the bigger question here, like other novel questions regarding firearms, firearms transport, and NFA items, isn't whether or not what you propose is legal, but whether or not other people think it is legal, and, if they do not think it's legal, what they might do about it and what the consequences of that might be.

The tried and true is preferable to the novel and new when criminal investigations are possible.