Author Peter Manso faces a decade in prison for nonviolent firearms violations
September 3rd, 2008 by Syd
Author Peter Manso faces a decade in prison for nonviolent firearms violations
POSTED September 2, 12:21 PM
J.D. Tuccille - Civil Liberties ExaminerProlific writer Peter Manso, author of, among other books, biographies of Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando, has been indicted on a dozen firearms charges by a Massachusetts grand jury and faces years in prison.
Did he brandish a gun in public? Threaten a neighbor with a drive-by shooting?
No, the guns were all stored, quite securely, in his locked and alarmed home. In fact, police discovered the weapons only when they responded to a burglar alarm while the writer was away. Either the guns were in plain view — evidence that Manso expected no legal trouble for their possession — or else, as Manso’s attorney alleges, "Truro police searched Manso’s house illegally while responding to the alarm." (The Times of London reports they were "in a cupboard.")
The mindboggling criminal charges for mere possession of inanimate objects are reported by the Boston Globe as follows:
Manso was indicted on charges of illegally possessing a large capacity weapon (a Colt AR-15 assault rifle), four counts of illegally possessing loading devices for that weapon, three counts of illegally possessing firearms, one count of illegally possessing ammunition, and three counts of improperly storing a firearm, according to a spokeswoman for Plymouth prosecutors.
The most serious charge, illegally possessing the assault rifle, carries a minimum sentence of 2 1/2 years in prison and a maximum of 10 years in prison. No date has been set for Manso’s next court hearing.
The main problem seems to be that Manso’s Firearms Identification Card expired after the passage of new legislation in 1998 — previously, FIDs lasted a lifetime; now they expire every six years. The new law has caused endless problems in the Bay State, since authorities have not been very effective about informing gun owners of the change. As the Globe reports, "In July 2002, a State House committee found that thousands of Massachusetts residents were probably unaware that they needed to renew fire identification cards."
The "assault rifle" is a separate issue, since that’s just outright illegal in Massachusetts. Still, Manso is in good company in its possession. In Can Gun Control Work?, James B. Jacobs, Director of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice at New York University, reported that Boston’s assault weapons ban has enjoyed a rousing compliance rate of about 1%. Challenged by a law that seems purely arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive (banned assault weapons are mechanically indistinguishable from many perfectly legal firearms), large numbers of Americans simply shrug their shoulders and symbolically tell legislators to go fish…
…Strictly speaking, the recent Heller decision should have made these charges impossible. By finally recognizing that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms, the Supreme Court ostensibly put the right to bear arms on the same footing as the right to free speech — and you can’t require people to get a license to speak their minds, nor can you ban high-capacity printing presses. But we’re still exploring the full implications of that decision, and Heller was worded loosely enough that it may permit restrictions of the sort that we would never permit to be applied to any other individual right.
So Peter Manso faces a potential life sentence (he’s 67) for doing no harm to anybody by violating laws that few respect and even fewer understand and thereby making himself vulnerable to officials who may be out to get him.
In a free country, that’s not how the law is supposed to work.
Source: Examiner.com
I guess the moral of this story is, when living in Massachusetts, if you’re going to install a burglar alarm, put your guns away before you leave the house. Jeepers. Of course, the real villain here is the “purely arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive” “assault weapons” ban in the state of Massachusetts, the kind of “assault weapons” ban that the Democratic party has written into its national platform. I hope that Manso can beat this one on the grounds of an improper search, but his guns are history regardless.
I know Mr. Manso, and I know for a fact that his firearms license had been revoked for him firing over the heads of local hunters who were hunting too close to his property for his liking.
He is a hot head who knew he was keeping the guns illegally, and while I am an advocate for gun rights, this man is EXACTLY the kind of person who should not be allowed to have a gun.
It’s his extreme behavior that will get all our guns taken away.