Dealing with Estate Firearms

One of the issues that seems to cause the most confusion or uncertainty pertains to firearms in an estate. When a person passes away and there are firearms in the estate, in principle the estate should not be wound up or finalised before the firearms have been dealt with–that is, all the firearms should have been transferred from the deceased to either the heirs, or to a firearm dealership, or to a third party.

The executor of the estate is the person legally entitled to deal with firearms. The executor is also entitled to store the firearms, as long as the firearm/s are stored in terms of the regulations. Upon the appointment of an executor, the executor must compile an inventory of all firearms and ammunition and firearm parts and submit same to the Registrar, Central Firearms Control Register.

However, in the past, in many instances the executor of the estate was unaware of, nor informed, that the deceased owned any firearms, or the executor left it up to the heirs and beneficiaries to deal with the firearms, resulting in many cases of firearms not being dealt with correctly at the time of finalising the estate.

This can cause untold problems when trying to