Air Force Veteran Stuck In Massachusetts Jail Over Legally Owned Guns

An Air Force veteran living out of his vehicle has been stuck in a Massachusetts jail for the past month after being branded “dangerous” by the state because he had several legally owned firearms in his car when he was pulled over for a traffic violation. 

According to an arrest report filed by police in Gardner, Massachusetts, an officer spotted a  car failing to yield at an intersection. After running the plates, the officer discovered that the vehicle’s registration had been revoked for lack of insurance and initiated a traffic stop. 

An Air Force veteran named Kyle Colutta was behind the wheel, though the car belonged to his girlfriend Sarande Jackson, who was in the passenger seat. Jackson informed the officer that the couple had just returned to Massachusetts to live near family, but had very little money, so they were making DoorDash deliveries to earn some cash. 

The officer informed the couple that he going to have the vehicle towed due to the lack of insurance, and told them to get what they needed from the car before the tow truck arrived. As he was conducting an inventory of the items in the car, the officer discovered “several medium-sized casings that appeared to be an ammunition case.” Colutta acknowledged to the officer that there was both ammunition in the car and a Glock handgun on his person. 

Colutta, being from Arizona, didn’t have a Massachusetts License to Carry, so that alone would have been enough to place him in cuffs at the scene under the state’s draconian gun laws. But police also found two other handguns, five rifles and “a fully stocked military-style ammo cases [sic] or carrier”. 

There doesn’t seem to be any dispute that Colutta can legally possess these items under federal law, but in the state of Massachusetts it was enough for a court to deem the veteran dangerous and order him held without bond for up to 120 days. 

The Gun Owners Action League’s Jim Wallace says Jackson reached out to the organization for help, and they’re on the case.

“The fact that a U.S. citizen can be detained without bail for exercising a civil right without government permission is unconscionable and unconstitutional,” said Jim Wallace, Executive Director of GOAL. “Kyle is an Air Force veteran with no criminal record that we are aware of, yet he was declared dangerous by the state. If he was pulled over a few miles north in New Hampshire he would have only been charged with an unregistered vehicle.”

Wallace says the group is talking with attorneys to see if there’s anything they can do for Colutta, and they’re also looking at trying to amend the state’s “dangerousness” statute so that simple possession of a firearm with a “large capacity feeding device” isn’t enough to stick someone in jail without bond for four months. 

As GOAL notes in their press release on Colutta’s detention, only “prohibited persons or persons being arrested for a violent underlying offense should be considered potentially dangerous.” Frankly, I think there are plenty of prohibited persons convicted of non-violent offense who shouldn’t automatically be presumed dangerous either, but it definitely should not be the case that simply exercising your right to keep and bear arms without a state-issued permission slip shouldn’t be cause to be kept in the pokey for months on end… or face felony charges. Colutta is now facing up to ten years in prison simply for possessing firearms and “large capacity” ammunition magazines without the proper paperwork.  

In a perfect world the officer would have warned Colutta that Massachusetts isn’t Arizona and informed him of what he needed to do to legally possess to those firearms as a non-resident before allowing the couple to be picked up by Jackson’s family and leave with their belongings… including the guns and ammunition. There’s no evidence that Colutta intended to commit a crime or was even aware that he was violating Massachusetts gun laws, but police and prosecutors are still bringing the hammer down on the Air Force veteran for his unauthorized exercise of the right to keep and bear arms. 

Editor’s Note: The anti-gunners would love to strip all of us of our Second Amendment rights.

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