A decorated Vietnam veteran was sentenced to 7 years in federal prison for a decades-old purchase of a rifle after authorities found the m14 in his home.
“This gun was very rare at that time it was rare to see one, so he instantly had a connection to it,” said Pick’s attorney Ryne Sandel. “Over the course of his life he and his wife and collected about 14 weapons, many of them were collector’s items.”
FoxNews reports that Alfred Pick, 70, purchased the M14 — a fully automatic weapon illegal to own — at a Ft. Worth gun show in the early 1980s, the Dallas Morning News reported.
The rifle, which had a scratched-off serial number, was similar to the one Pick used as an Army lieutenant in Vietnam, where he earned a Silver Star after participating in more than 100 combat missions and his brief time as a POW.
“The man is a Silver Star winner, he saved lives, he took care of his wife, he’s been in custody for a year, I would think that when a man turned 70 and is an American hero you don’t destroy the rest of his life for one mistake,” Mark Shackelford, a friend, told KDFW-TV.
Shackelford called the weapon the “piece de resistance” of Pick’s collection, adding that “He had shown it to me. I’ve never seen it taken out of the case.
Ryne Sandel, Pick’s attorney, said his client had a “connection” to the rifle at the time.
Pick has accumulated dozens of weapons over the years, most of them collectibles, Sandel said.
Last year, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents looking for the rifle raided Pick’s Plano, Texas, home two weeks after his wife died of cancer and found…
“He’s had it all these years never robbed a bank or done anything with it,” said Pick’s friend Mark Shackelford. “Somebody that made one mistake and now 50 years later, he’s paying a really big price for it.”
“He was a gun collector, and it was probably the piece de resistance of his collection… he had shown it to me. I’ve never seen it taken it out of the case,” said Shackelford. “The man is a Silver Star winner, he saved lives, he took care of his wife, he’s been in custody for a year, I would think that when a man turned 70 and is an American hero, you don’t destroy the rest of his life for one mistake,”